The Bride's Farewell Hardback - 2009

One

On the morning of August the twelfth, eighteen hundred and fifty something, on the day she was to be married, Pell Ridley crept up from her bed in the dark, kissed her sisters goodbye, fetched Jack in from the wind and rain on the heath, and told him they were leaving. Not that he was likely to offer any objections, being a horse.

There wasn’t much to take. Bread and cheese and a bottle of ale, a clean apron, a rope for Jack, and a book belonging to Mam with pictures of birds drawn in soft pencil, which no one ever looked at but her.

The dress in which she was to be married she left untouched, spread over a dusty chair. Then she felt carefully inside the best teapot for the coins put away for her dowry, slipped the rope around Jack’s neck and turned to go.

Head down, squinting into the rain, she stopped short at the sight of a ghostly figure in the path. It had as little substance as a moth, but its eyes burned a hole in the dark.

“Go back to bed, Bean.”

It didn’t budge.

She sighed, noticing how the pale oval of a face remained stubbornly set.

“Please, Bean. Go home.” Oh God, she thought, no. But it was no use appealing to God about something already decided.

Without waiting to be invited, the boy scrambled up onto Jack, and with no other option she pulled herself up behind him, feeling the warmth of his thin body against her own. And so it was, with a resigned chirrup to Jack and no tear in her eye, that they set off down the hill, heading north, which at that moment appeared to be the exact direction in which lay the rest of the world.

“I’m sorry, Birdie,” whispered the girl, with a final thought for the husband that should have been. Perhaps at the last minute he would find another bride. Perhaps he would marry Lou. Anyone will do, she thought. As long as it isn’t me.

"Pell Ridley will captivate the readers of this book."
— The Globe and Mail

"Rosoff specializes in feisty heroines, and her main character here, Pell Ridley, is no exception."
— The Guardian (UK)

"Meg Rosoff is a wonderful, captivating writer--her evocation of place and time are pitch-perfect."
— Daily Telegraph (UK)

"As exhilarating as a ride across the moors, Rosoff's fourth novel is rich in the emotional landscape of the untamed female heart. . . . Rosoff's vivid, pared-down style brings it closer to a kind of western . . . every sentence is crafted and weighted with beauty, but it's the intelligence and shaping sensibility with which the story is told that make it something special."
— The Times (London)

“Rosoff specializes in feisty heroines, and her main character here, Pell Ridley, is no exception…. Rosoff never patronises her readership or succumbs to the desire to make goodness seem simple: her world is as morally ambiguous as it is deftly realized, and all the better for it.”
—The Guardian 
 

Meg Rosoff was born in Boston and now lives in London with her husband and daughter. Her debut novel How I Live Now was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, and nominated for the Orange Award for New Writers. Her second novel, Just In Case, won the 2007 CILIP Carnegie Medal and was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. What I Was was shortlisted for both the 2008 CILIP Carnegie Medal and the Costa Book Award.