For everyone who’s ever thought of writing a novel and everyone with a difficult mother – which covers practically everybody…

Arabella Hicks loves books more than anything. That’s why she’s such a good creative writing teacher: she understands fiction, and her pupils.  All she needs now is to finish her own novel, and her life will be complete. 
But, after seven years, her novel isn’t actually finished.  In fact, it’s barely begun, what with all that punctuation to amend, and those endings to decide on, and the games of Solitaire on her computer… What’s more, this year’s batch of pupils are a little disappointing; she feels she knows their stories already, before they’ve even had their moment in class.  Perhaps the problem is that she’s distracted.  Her weekly visits to her impossible mother are becoming harder work; her mother is growing more ill and it looks increasingly unlikely that Arabella will find a way to understand, even to love, her before it is too late. 
Something has to change and, to Arabella’s surprise, classes, and mothers, still have the ability to surprise her, and soon she finds that her own ending isn’t quite what she expected.  After all, in the best books they never are.

Witty, intelligent and profoundly wise, Susan Breen’s THE FICTION CLASS teaches us as much about the craft of writing fiction as it does about memory, compassion and the changing faces of love.

"Each student in Arabella's class is given a voice through their fiction writing exercises and she finds her personal problems increasingly impinging on her class discussions. Throughout the novel, the verbal fencing between mother and daughter is very realistic and, at times, poignant." Teresa Majury