It’s little wonder that Emma Glass’s ‘mrs jekyll’, which totally dismantles and rebuilds the Robert Louis Stephenson classic, was nominated for the Gordon Burn Prize, because it’s a wholly original, boundary-pushing piece of work. It concerns a schoolteacher, Rosy Winter, who is dying from cancer. Her husband tries to offer her all the support he can; her sister-in-law, not so much. But as Rosy tries to make sense of her situation amid the hospital visits, tarot card readings, and homeopathic remedies, something other than the cancer is stirring within her… ‘mrs jekyll’ is a fever dream of a book, particularly when the transformation scenes kick in (with those sections written in blank verse), and the results are strangely beautiful, visceral, and not afraid to reach into the darker reaches of our psyches. It's a pretty slim book – with short, punchy chapters – but if you’re looking for an original feminist tale, then ‘mrs jekyll’ is truly transformative stuff. RM

Published by 

Cherio Publishing