Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, Pam Williams’s A Trace of Sun was published by Legend Press in March 2024. Louise Hare (author of This Lovely City and Miss Aldridge Regrets) calls the novel “An unflinching look at one family’s experience of immigration, exploring mental health, identity and family.”
Description: ‘Don’t go Mammy please.’ Stuttered words filled her ears, sent frissons of guilt through her as she bent over him; held him to her thumping chest. Tears sliding from her face to his.’
Raef is left behind in Grenada when his mother, Cilla, follows her husband to England in search of a better life. When they are finally reunited seven years later, they are strangers – and the emotional impact of the separation leads to events that rip their family apart. As they try to move forward with their lives, his mother’s secret will make Raef question all he’s ever known of who he is.
A Trace of Sun is, in part, inspired by the author’s own family experiences.
Pam Williams: A Londoner of Grenadian heritage, Pam graduated from St Martin’s School of Art in 1984 with a degree in Fashion and spent the next two decades working in the industry as a journalist, Fashion Editor (at She, PS, Shape and Now magazines) and freelance stylist.
Whilst she’s currently a teacher at a special needs school, writing continues to be a constant in Pam’s life. She joined the Afrikan Heritage Writers group in 2014 and contributed poetry and prose pieces (which she performs) to the collective’s anthology 100 Years Unheard – WW1 and the Afrikan Diasporan Woman (2018).
Pam’s highly commended short story “Soul Talking” was published in the City of Stories (2017) compilation from Spread the Word; and she is an alumnus of the writer development agency’s London Writers Award (2019). She won the BlackInk New Writing Prize 2022 for her short story “Hibiscus.”
Pam’s work has the black experience at its heart with a focus on the importance of family and the need to belong – although always in unique ways. [. . .]
For more on Pam Williams, see https://www.northbanktalent.com/clients/fiction-drama/pam-williams/
A Trace of Sun
Pam Williams
Legend Press, March 2024
302 pages
ISBN 978-1915643353 (pb)
For more information, see https://www.legendpress.co.uk/a-trace-of-sun and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trace-Sun-extraordinary-exploring-separation/dp/191564335X
Many thanks to Peter Jordens for additional material; see interviews at:
https://womensprize.com/in-conversation-with-pam-williams and https://www.voice-online.co.uk/entertainment/2024/03/06/pam-williams-pens-a-trace-of-sun
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, Pam Williams’s A Trace of Sun was published by Legend Press in March 2024. Louise Hare (author of This Lovely City and Miss Aldridge Regrets) calls the novel “An unflinching look at one family’s experience of immigration, exploring mental health, identity and family.” Description: ‘Don’t go Mammy
