Jackie Kay

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF PICADOR BOOKS You think adoption is a story which has an end. But the point about it is that it has no end. It keeps changing its ending. From the moment when, as a little girl, she realises that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing...

'The most vivid evocation of Bessie Smith I have ever read' - Ian Carr, BBC Music '[Bessie Smith] showed me the air and taught me how to fill it ... she's the reason I started singing, really' - Janis Joplin Bessie Smith: singer, icon, pioneer. Bessie Smith was born in Tennessee in 1894. Orphaned by the age of nine, she...