Welcome to Sylvia Murphy's Books

Sylvia Murphy was born in Palestine and brought up in war-torn England and her recent novel Candy's Children is based on many of the events she and her family lived through in those years.

Her early novels (The Complete Knowledge of Sally Fry and The Life and Times of Barly Beach) were wry comedies based on family life but here she draws on a darker side of family relationships to relate what could have happened to a girl deprived of love and thrown out into the world to fend for herself. During the course of the story, Candy (Candice) Hargreaves bears five children to four different fathers, and has a habit of losing control of their lives so that by the time they meet up for her funeral most of them have never met each other. Candy fights her way from being a frightened and abandoned teenager in the fast disintegrating country of Palestine, finds her way to England where she works in an East End sweatshop sewing soldiers' uniforms, then joins the WAAF from which she is discharged when she becomes an unmarried mother. Her later adventures take her to Hollywood, then back to London, and finally to a stately home in Yorkshire and marriage to a lonely, ageing Earl who doesn't want to lose his only grandson.

Her latest novel, Crocodiles has a very different setting. It is based on a visit Sylvia made to Africa a couple of years ago, where a young man is looking for his missing brother and finds he can trust nobody.

Now a new book is about to hit the shelves - Tyfoon's Tale - the true story of a seafaring cat It is my version of an animal memoir, which are proving very popular at the moment. Publication date is end of June, when it will be available in all book shops and libraries, on Amazon and through this website

Until then you can read all about its progress through www.blogspot.Tyfoonstale.com

"TYFOON’S TALE The true story of a seafaring cat"

TYFOON’S TALE The true story of a seafaring cat

In 1989 Sylvia Murphy and David Greenland set off to sail around the world in their 60 year old Maurice Griffiths’ Ketch, Nyala. While they were in Portugal they adopted one of the many lost, sickly kittens that haunt the harbours of Southern Europe. They called her Tyfoon, after the Belgian boat that first rescued her. This is the true story of how Tyfoon took over and re-organised the direction of Sylvia’s life for the next eighteen years. It is a mixture of comedy and disaster, courage and love, that pulls at the heartstrings.

ISBN 978-0-9550512-3-4

RRP £7.99 + £2.00 p&p

Another featured book by Sylvia Murphy

THE COMPLETE KNOWLEDGE OF SALLY FRY

What is to be done when your thesis is long overdue, your son has run away from home and even retreating to a remote holiday cottage in Cornwall with a mother adept at absorbing (or is it attracting) problems has not brought the required peace and quiet? For Sally Fry, the harassed heroine of this unusual novel, the answer is to write her Complete Knowledge: bits and pieces of random information which she hopes will clarify and make sense of her haphazard life. But, far from clearing her mind for more serious work, Sally’s Knowledge increasingly comes to reflect the hilarious and often outrageous events which overtake her through the eventful summer.

"Sylvia Murphy writes with tremendous aplomb and disarming wit" - The Times

"Acidly observant and bitchy" - The Observer

"Most accomplished, very funny, very human" - Homes & Gardens

ISBN 978-0575033535

RRP £9.95 + £2.00 p&p