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“Gripping – and profound… Kate Sawyer has a great gift for capturing the tiny details that tell us everything about a person or dynamic.” — Marian Keyes

Margaret Smith is at the beach. It is a summer day unlike any other Margaret has ever known. The Smith family have left the town where they live and work and go to school and come to a place where the sky is blue, the sand is white, and the sound of the sea surrounds them. An ordinary family discovering the joy of getting away for the first time. Over the course of the coming decades, they will be transformed through their holiday experiences, each new destination a backdrop as the family grows and changes, love stories begin and end — and secrets are revealed.

Coming this summer, Getting Away is a dazzlingly ambitious new novel from the author of This Family, and the Costa shortlisted The Stranding.

Biography

Kate Sawyer worked as an actor and theatre and events producer before writing several short films and then turning her hand to fiction. Her debut novel, The Stranding, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the East Anglian fiction prize, was adapted for BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and is being developed for the screen by Fremantle and Afua Hirsch’s production company Born In Me. Her second novel This Family was a Waterstones Paperback of the Year 2024. Getting Away, her third novel, will be published by Zaffre in July 2025.

When Kate isn’t writing, or talking to other authors about their writing practices for her podcast Novel Experience, she is busy producing the annual Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival. 

After twenty years living in London, she now lives in her native East Anglia, with her young daughter.