Blue Woman is the fictional life of Rose Hartwood, an eminent 20th Century Welsh artist, which charts with great subtlety and sensitivity the ebbs and flows of her personal and professional lives. We follow Rose the artist: her rise from a bombed-out house in wartime London to something close to fame in the late sixties. We also follow Rose the woman: forced to give a child up for adoption as a teenager, then a marriage that is increasingly at odds with the freedom she needs. Ultimately, she must face the question all artists ask themselves: how to come to terms with one's own life and work?

This tender and deeply felt novel gradually reveals both artist and woman in their inter-
twined complexity: joy, struggle, determination, achievement, regret, the inheritances of love and the consolations of beauty.