Tamara Drewe is a young journalist who returns to the Dorset village where she grew up, having had her nose fixed, and she causes chaos among the writers at a retreat run by a famous novelist and his long-suffering wife. It is a loose, modern retelling of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, and it is funny, sharp and very English.
Simmonds is one of Britain's greatest cartoonists, and the book, first serialised in the Guardian, mixes comics with prose in a way that is all her own. Stephen Frears filmed it in 2010, with Gemma Arterton.
