The Dixons (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781511501200)

Claudette Beckford-Brady is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. She was born in Old Harbour, Jamaica and spent the first seven years of her life in the country district of Gravel Hill, Bois Content in south-west St. Catherine before going to join her parents who had migrated to the United Kingdom, leaving her in the care of her great-grandmother. She learned to read at her great-grandmother's knee before ever starting school, and it was there she developed the love of reading which has stayed with her throughout her life. In England she was introduced to the lending library and was in readers' paradise at the number of books which were available to her. At some point it occurred to her that she could perhaps write as well as, if not better, than some of the authors she was reading and this inspired her to start writing short stories, but did nothing with them. It was only when she returned to Jamaica from the UK in 1991 that she started writing in earnest. She began entering her stories in literary competitions and won a number of prizes and awards. Encouraged by this she decided to try her hand at a full length novel and in 2007 her debut novel Sweet Home Jamaica was published in the UK by Pegasus Elliot McKenzie. She followed up with the sequel, The Missing Years in 2009 and her third novel Return to Fidelity a couple of years later. In 2014 she self-published a collection of her award-winning short stories called Yaard and Abroad. The Dixons is her latest offering and the first one written specifically for teenagers. Beckford-Brady is a proud Jamaican and sets all her stories in and around her hometown of Old Harbour on Jamaica's south coast.