Kit de Waal
Author of My Name Is Leon
About the Author
Works by Kit de Waal
Associated Works
New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent (2019) — Contributor — 115 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1960
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Oxford Brookes University(MA|Creative Writing)
- Occupations
- She worked for 15 years in criminal and family law and as a magistrate (Justice of the Peace). She sits on adoption panels, worked as an adviser for Social Services and has written training manuals on adoption and foster care.
- Short biography
- Mandy Theresa O'Loughlin (born 26 July 1960), known professionally as Kit de Waal, is an English writer. De Waal was born in Birmingham, England, to Sheila O'Loughlin (née Doyle), a foster carer, registered child minder and auxiliary nurse, and Arthur Desmond O'Loughlin, a bus driver. Her maternal grandparents were Irish, from County Wexford, her father was from Basseterre, St. Kitts in the West Indies and a descendant of William Julius.
De Waal attended Waverly Grammar School in Small Heath, Birmingham. She worked for 15 years in criminal and family law and as a magistrate (Justice of the Peace). She sits on adoption panels, worked as an adviser for Social Services and has written training manuals on adoption and foster care. She began writing for pleasure at an early age, and when her children were relatively independent, she decided to study creative writing which she did at Oxford Brookes University, achieving a master's degree.De Waal is married to John de Waal, QC, son of Victor de Waal. They have two children. - Nationality
- England
UK - Birthplace
- Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, UK
- Map Location
- England, UK
Members
Discussions
British Author Challenge April 2026: Kit de Waal & Stephen Fry in 75 Books Challenge for 2026 (May 9)
Reviews
This is excellent - and we all know how hard a marker I am when it comes to books. Starting in 1972 in Birmingham, this stetches over the next 20 years. Paulette is an auxillary nurse, working hard, trying to make ends meet and to save up for her perfect life with Denton, who turns out to not be all that perfect,as he has a wife and children across town. Denton's been killed in a car crash and to say that Paulette ends up caring for the grandson of the man who killed the love of her life show more makes this sound highly improbable - and yet, it really isn't. Such acceptance and forgiveness happens slowly, by degrees, and by being gradual, with no big gestures, it feels entirely rational and is not at all sentimental. It's also not exactly a smooth road, there are lumps and bumps along the way. We move through Paulette's life from her late 20s to late 40s. We see her second best relationship with Garfield, Denton's friend and the way she brings up their son, Bird, as a single mother while negotiating Garfield's moving on and his second family. She has such dreadful taste in men that you want to shake her and comiserate with her in equal measure. She has her ups and downs, she has friends that she loses track of as her life twists and turns and yet she remains completely herself.
Paulette is real, I would know her if I met her. She has all the flaws and foibles of a real person. She also has that great heart and really does pour her heart and soul into her son, Bird and his friend Nellie. She gives her best to all of them, and who can ask more of anyone else in this life. I loved Paulette and she is so well constructed that I didn;t want to leave her show less
Paulette is real, I would know her if I met her. She has all the flaws and foibles of a real person. She also has that great heart and really does pour her heart and soul into her son, Bird and his friend Nellie. She gives her best to all of them, and who can ask more of anyone else in this life. I loved Paulette and she is so well constructed that I didn;t want to leave her show less
This is excellent, is also unbearably sad and has a twist I never saw coming (although, thinking about it, the clues are there).
Mona is a dollmaker, Irish, living in England (took me quite a while to grasp that, the narrator being Irish made me think it was set in Ireland, rather than simply reflecting Mona's Irish origins.) and about to turn 60. We find out about her life, her business, her assistant, Joley, and Joley's plans to go and be a teaching assistant. We also find ourselves show more willing Mona on when an elegant looking man salutes her with his mug in the wee small hours during mutual bouts of insomnia. They meet, they have coffee and cake, might this be going somewhere?
Along side this, we hear of Mona's past, from her childhood and the loss of her mother, growing up with just her father & visits to Bridie O'Connor. She then travels to Birmingham, where she meets and very soon falls for William. So far, so much smooth sailing. However there is clearly a deep sorrow in Mona's life. In the present, of the activity she undertakes with those who have suffered a still birth or an early loss of a baby. We hear one session where the woman tells of her hopes and dreams for the lost little one and this acts as a form of therapy. By now, we are, therefore, expecting that Mona & William lose their baby. What we don't expect is for that to happen the night of the Birmingham pub bombings, and for this to have a dramatic effect on their lives.
In the present we hear of the life Mona has created for herself. It's not been very exciting, it's not involved great adventure, it's been a quietly satisfactory life carried out under a great sadness. We wonder what she is doing in an English sea side town and why she has remained resolutely single. Actually, I had less problem with this aspect of a widow staying single, it's been my experience that's what widowed women do. My mother, grandmother & great grandmothers were all widowed and remains so for 11, 20 & over 50 years.
The things that left me doubting slightly were timing. If Beatrice was born and lost in 1974, when Mona was 20 and as she's now 60 this is set in about 2014. Reading that now, the timings felt off, but they're probably right. In 2014, at no point does anyone use a mobile phone. OK, they weren't smart phone levels of ubiquity, but they were fairly common even them. Mona does run her business partly over the internet, but that's mostly Joley by the descriptions given. Based on her being 60 in about 2014, she was of an age with my mother, who was pretty tech savvy and learnt most of that in her late 40s/50s. Mona only learns how to do it when she has to, which felt a bit awry in some way. I listened to this and a couple of times it was not clear to me where we were in time until we were a couple of sentences in. Personally I could have done with a date or an indicator of timeframe at the start of each chapter, as that would have helped anchor me more securely in the narrative era. I don't understand the homing instinct, I don't have that, but I appreciate it may be part of someone else's mental makeup.
This is a life lived under a shadow. Loss comes to Mona in many ways, her mother while a child, her father while away, her child and husband. These different losses play on her in different ways and their echoes are felt in her present in different ways. That makes this books oppressively sad and it isn't, it just sits under a shadow. There is light and shade, but it is not a life in technicolor, it remains coloured in sepia. In several places we hear about time and the relationship between than and love. The trick to time is to speed it up and slow it down according to the state of relationship and love. It doesn't work, of course, time is what it is. But there are moments that seem to last for ever, or the memory of them lasts for ever. show less
Mona is a dollmaker, Irish, living in England (took me quite a while to grasp that, the narrator being Irish made me think it was set in Ireland, rather than simply reflecting Mona's Irish origins.) and about to turn 60. We find out about her life, her business, her assistant, Joley, and Joley's plans to go and be a teaching assistant. We also find ourselves show more willing Mona on when an elegant looking man salutes her with his mug in the wee small hours during mutual bouts of insomnia. They meet, they have coffee and cake, might this be going somewhere?
Along side this, we hear of Mona's past, from her childhood and the loss of her mother, growing up with just her father & visits to Bridie O'Connor. She then travels to Birmingham, where she meets and very soon falls for William. So far, so much smooth sailing. However there is clearly a deep sorrow in Mona's life. In the present, of the activity she undertakes with those who have suffered a still birth or an early loss of a baby. We hear one session where the woman tells of her hopes and dreams for the lost little one and this acts as a form of therapy. By now, we are, therefore, expecting that Mona & William lose their baby. What we don't expect is for that to happen the night of the Birmingham pub bombings, and for this to have a dramatic effect on their lives.
In the present we hear of the life Mona has created for herself. It's not been very exciting, it's not involved great adventure, it's been a quietly satisfactory life carried out under a great sadness. We wonder what she is doing in an English sea side town and why she has remained resolutely single. Actually, I had less problem with this aspect of a widow staying single, it's been my experience that's what widowed women do. My mother, grandmother & great grandmothers were all widowed and remains so for 11, 20 & over 50 years.
The things that left me doubting slightly were timing. If Beatrice was born and lost in 1974, when Mona was 20 and as she's now 60 this is set in about 2014. Reading that now, the timings felt off, but they're probably right. In 2014, at no point does anyone use a mobile phone. OK, they weren't smart phone levels of ubiquity, but they were fairly common even them. Mona does run her business partly over the internet, but that's mostly Joley by the descriptions given. Based on her being 60 in about 2014, she was of an age with my mother, who was pretty tech savvy and learnt most of that in her late 40s/50s. Mona only learns how to do it when she has to, which felt a bit awry in some way. I listened to this and a couple of times it was not clear to me where we were in time until we were a couple of sentences in. Personally I could have done with a date or an indicator of timeframe at the start of each chapter, as that would have helped anchor me more securely in the narrative era. I don't understand the homing instinct, I don't have that, but I appreciate it may be part of someone else's mental makeup.
This is a life lived under a shadow. Loss comes to Mona in many ways, her mother while a child, her father while away, her child and husband. These different losses play on her in different ways and their echoes are felt in her present in different ways. That makes this books oppressively sad and it isn't, it just sits under a shadow. There is light and shade, but it is not a life in technicolor, it remains coloured in sepia. In several places we hear about time and the relationship between than and love. The trick to time is to speed it up and slow it down according to the state of relationship and love. It doesn't work, of course, time is what it is. But there are moments that seem to last for ever, or the memory of them lasts for ever. show less
I loved Kit de Waal's My Name is Leon, so when I saw The Trick to Time was coming out, I grabbed an ARC as quickly as I could. This book is fairly different from the previous one, but by no means less powerful. The focus here is on Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish dollmaker, and her efforts to live to the full the life she has left.
The book alternates between present-day Mona and her past, first as child in Ireland trying to cope with her mother's illness, and later as a young woman attempting show more to build a new life in England. I loved slowly getting to know Mona: as her past is unveiled and her present unfolds before our eyes, she gradually shapes up to be a wonderfully complex character. Supported by an unforgettable cast of secondary characters, Mona tries to put together pieces of her past life, and tries to overcome pain bigger than anyone should ever have to face.
The author's wonderful writing style takes us back to a time when life was different, and when social tensions exploded, immediately contrasting that with the quiet seaside town where present-day Mona lives. And it just works. Mona is complex and charismatic enough to hold the whole story together, the settings and historical elements add depth to the story, and the final revelations did surprise me a little bit, as I had drawn completely the wrong conclusion! The only negative for me is that, at times, the narration felt a bit slow, making this feel longer than it really is, but it was definitely worth it!
For this and more reviews, visit Book for Thought.
I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way. show less
The book alternates between present-day Mona and her past, first as child in Ireland trying to cope with her mother's illness, and later as a young woman attempting show more to build a new life in England. I loved slowly getting to know Mona: as her past is unveiled and her present unfolds before our eyes, she gradually shapes up to be a wonderfully complex character. Supported by an unforgettable cast of secondary characters, Mona tries to put together pieces of her past life, and tries to overcome pain bigger than anyone should ever have to face.
The author's wonderful writing style takes us back to a time when life was different, and when social tensions exploded, immediately contrasting that with the quiet seaside town where present-day Mona lives. And it just works. Mona is complex and charismatic enough to hold the whole story together, the settings and historical elements add depth to the story, and the final revelations did surprise me a little bit, as I had drawn completely the wrong conclusion! The only negative for me is that, at times, the narration felt a bit slow, making this feel longer than it really is, but it was definitely worth it!
For this and more reviews, visit Book for Thought.
I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way. show less
In 1972, Paulette is an auxiliary nurse, working hard in a Birmingham hospital, saving hard, looking forward to marriage and children with the man she loves, buying a nice house. Then one day, a knock at the door brings her world crashing down, putting a sudden end to her dreams. Her boyfriend Denton's no-good friend Garfield has come to break the bad news - Denton has been killed in a car crash, and no, Paulette can't rush to the hospital, because his wife, kids and mother are there.
She show more drifts into a relationship with Garfield, and they have a son, Bird. He is a loyal, loving dad, but Paulette continues to feel that her life has been snatched away by the drunk driver who apparently caused the crash. Then she meets the man who she thinks ruined her life, Frank, and his grandson Nellie. Frank is still struggling with alcohol and struggling to look after Nellie properly. Paulette is furious with Frank, but can't help wanting to reach out and help Nellie.
Any description makes The Best of Everything sound rather sentimental but somehow Kit De Waal's writing balances anger and sadness with dark humour, and it is a powerful, moving story of unlikely friendships and a different kind of love. show less
She show more drifts into a relationship with Garfield, and they have a son, Bird. He is a loyal, loving dad, but Paulette continues to feel that her life has been snatched away by the drunk driver who apparently caused the crash. Then she meets the man who she thinks ruined her life, Frank, and his grandson Nellie. Frank is still struggling with alcohol and struggling to look after Nellie properly. Paulette is furious with Frank, but can't help wanting to reach out and help Nellie.
Any description makes The Best of Everything sound rather sentimental but somehow Kit De Waal's writing balances anger and sadness with dark humour, and it is a powerful, moving story of unlikely friendships and a different kind of love. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 9
- Also by
- 5
- Members
- 727
- Popularity
- #34,930
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 52
- ISBNs
- 50
- Languages
- 3