Eva Trout

Elizabeth Bowen’s portrayal of an unconventional heiress with a huge "capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble, strewing trouble around her".

"Bowen is magnificent when she writes about conspiracy, duplicity and ambiguity, and her achievement... is extremely impressive."  –  Margaret Drabble

Aged 24, orphaned Eva has finally found a home of sorts in Worcestershire with her former schoolteacher, Iseult Arbles. From a safe distance in London, her guardian, Constantine, assumes all is well. But Eva’s flighty, romantic nature hasn’t entirely clicked with the Arbles household, and she is plotting to escape. When she sets out to hock her Jaguar and disappear without a trace, she unwittingly leaves a paper trail for her various custodians - and all kinds of trouble - to follow.

"[Elizabeth Bowen] is what happened after Bloomsbury..  the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."  –  Victoria Glendinning

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the great writers about the Irish ascendancy and about wartime Britain, both topics - by birth and experience (with the Ministry of Information) - she knew much about. Although she made her name as a novelist in the 1930s, Bowen was shortlisted for the Booker prize 40 years later in 1970 with Eva Trout, and in 1977 was the subject of a biography by Victoria Glendinning (chair of the 1992 Booker Prize judges).