Joanna Nadin

Joanna Nadin moves between fiction for children, teenagers, and general readers, drawing on family life, memory, and the comic unease of adolescence. The Queen of Bloody Everything marked her first novel for a general readership and appeared from Pan Macmillan in 2018. Its narrator, Dido, tells the story of her unconventional mother Edie while sitting beside her in a Cambridge hospital. The account begins with Dido’s childhood fascination with the apparently ordinary Trevelyan family next door and expands into a portrait of class, longing, mothers, daughters, and the identities people build from stories. Nadin had already established a wide readership through the Rachel Riley books and Joe All Alone before moving into this broader fiction. Her academic work in creative writing also considered how voice and self-invention shaped related projects. The Queen of Bloody Everything brings those interests into a bittersweet family novel whose humor and nostalgia remain closely tied to Dido’s evolving understanding of Edie.