The Gypsy’s Daughter

Katie Hutton

GROWING up with a Gypsy father and a mother who gave up everything she had known to marry him, Harmony ‘Harry’ Loveridge’s life has been unconventional but happy.

And when she gets the chance to go to university, it seems Harry will achieve her long-held ambition… but fate has a way of getting in the way of dreams and one night her world comes crashing down.

In the follow-up to her debut novel, The Gypsy Bride, Katie Hutton continues her compelling exploration of love and culture clash as we move into the post-war period of the 1950s with the daughter of Sam and Ellen Loveridge, the two star-crossed lovers who had to overcome the prejudice and hostility of their entrenched communities to marry.

It was while browsing in a charity shop that Hutton (pictured below) stumbled across a book detailing the intrinsic part played by seasonal Romany Gypsies during the hop-picking season in Kent in the early decades of the 20^th century, and its depiction of them as the ‘warp and weft of the agricultural year’ set in motion these richly detailed cross-cultural sagas.

Harry is growing up on a farm in Kent in the 1940s and 50s. Her Gypsy father Sam has settled down as manager of a hop farm and retains his family’s Gypsy ways and customs while her mother Ellen is a teacher and encourages her bright and lively daughter to aim high.

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Eager to go to university, and with a scholarship in sight, it looks as though Harry is about to get what she wants until one night, during the yearly hopping, the girl is subjected to a terrible trauma which threatens to end her dreams.

If she is to pursue the future she always wanted, Harry must draw on all her strength and courage to win a scholarship and embark on her new beginnings at Nottingham University. Will she be able to escape the tragedies of her past, or is history doomed to repeat itself? With its soaring passions, human dramas and emotional poignancy, and a gritty evocation of the social constraints on women wanting to break the bounds of domestic expectation in this period, The Gypsy’s Daughter is an enthralling and well-researched saga with the charismatic figure of Harry Loveridge at its beating heart.

The beautiful Kent countryside and the contrasting busy streets of Nottingham, heart-soaring romance and gritty reality, also play roles in this emotionally powerful story which explores mid-20^th century social history and comes complete with an old-fashioned recipe for sweet scones. Delicious summertime reading!
(Zaffre, paperback, £7.99)