Crystal Jeans

A searing, reflective and truthful collection of essays by award-winning writer, Crystal Jeans, as she explores the struggles of addiction and mental health during the turbulent transition of adolescence into adulthood through to the strains of marriage, childbirth and parenting. Growing up in south Wales, navigating gender and sexuality, Jeans writes about her relationships with others as well as her own body with a frank self-awareness. Fiercely feminist, brutally honest and full of sharp cultural references, Blueprints is not another trauma story but a vital validation of the act of writing about pain and loss while grappling with identity in a troubled world.

'Delightfully subversive, I loved it' RED The darkly funny new novel from Polari Prize-shortlisted author Crystal Jeans, inspired in part by Dickens' Great Expectations… It’s 1924, and the village of Skimpole is full of secrets. When Anastasia’s mother dies, she must move in with ‘the Aunt’ – a writer, too fearsome for a first name, who lives in a dilapidated mansion with her dogs. But mysteries abound: who wrote the raunchy love letters she discovers in the Aunt’s bedroom, signed ‘Big Willy’? Why do the villagers hate the Aunt so much? And how did Anastasia’s father, who passed before she was born, really die? When the Aunt’s friends arrive at the house one summer, wreathed in cigarette smoke and an air of debauchery, Anastasia may be closer to finding answers – but the truth will turn her world upside down…