I write this sitting at the kitchen sink' is the first line of a novel about love, sibling rivalry and a bohemian existence in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Cassandra Mortmin's journal records her fadingly glamorous stepmother, her beautiful, wistful older sister and the man to whom they owe both their isolation and poverty - Father. The author of one experimental novel, and a minor cause celebre, he has since suffered from writer's block and is determined to drag his family down with him. But if the iron has entered Father's soul it hasn't penetrated Cassandra's...

Prizes

Runner-up for The BBC Big Read Top 100 2003. Shortlisted for BBC Big Read Top 100 2003.

This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met J.K. Rowling A delicious, compulsively readable novel about young love and its vicissitudes. What fun! Erica Jong Much more fun than the reader has any right to expect THE WEEKLY STANDARD Dreamy and funny...an odd, shimmering timelessness clings to its pages. A thousand and one cheers for its reissue. A + ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Dodie Smith (1896-1990) was born and brought up in Manchester and trained at RADA. She was a dramatist and writer. She went to US in 1939 with her manager Alec Beesley whom she later married. I Capture the Castle sold over a million copies after it was first published in 1949.