Skyhook in the Midnight Sun (Masks) - Softcover

Fiona Cooper is the author of Rotary Spokes, Heartbreak on the High Sierra and Not the Swiss Family Robinson. She was born in 1955 and now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.

A government grant takes lesbian artist Caz Hewson north to Newcastle and away from "the five, nearly six, best years of her life," spent in a London house shared after college with six art-school friends. She surprises herself by staying in the northern England city for years and transforming the last in a series of apartments--a reeking, filthy, rent-subsidized flat in the middle of post-Thatcherite blight--into a clean, freshly painted environment decorated with mythological dragons, flying pigs, and other whimsical creatures. Into her new setting come new friends, some earthly, some of another realm entirely; some many years her senior, some her contemporaries; and one from the past whom, with a survivor's guilt, she dreads confronting. Told extensively in British slang and regional idiom, this meandering story of finding warmth, community, vitality, and hope is a welcome addition to lesbian fiction. Whitney Scott