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The Stirrings

Winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize

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The Stirrings

By: Catherine Taylor
Narrated by: Catherine Taylor
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About this listen

 Winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize

'Part poignant memoir of time and place. Part record of the violence, and indifference, against which most girls grow up. The Stirrings is a pleasure and a shock' Eimear McBride

'A superb, moving and disturbing memoir - haunting and unforgettable' Jonathan Coe

This is a story about one young woman coming of age, and about the place and time that shaped her: the North of England in the 1970s and 80s.

About the scorching summer of 1976 - the last Catherine Taylor would spend with both her parents in their home in Sheffield.

About the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer whose haunting presence in Catherine's childhood was matched only by the aching absence of her own father.

About a country thrown into disarray by the nuclear threat and the Miners' Strike, just as Catherine's adolescent body was invaded by a debilitating illness.

About 1989's 'Second Summer of Love', a time of sexual awakening for Catherine, and the unforeseen consequences that followed it.

About a tragic accident, and how the insidious dangers facing women would became increasingly apparent as Catherine crossed into to adulthood. Cultural & Regional Women England Memoir

Critic reviews

Captures the fear and euphoria of growing up with precision and wry, spiky flair (Susie Boyt)
Part poignant memoir of time and place. Part record of the violence, and indifference, against which most girls grow up. THE STIRRINGS is a pleasure and a shock (Eimear McBride)
From chlorine and Quavers to the Jesus and Mary Chain, an engaging personal and political 1980s awakening (Richard Beard)
So stylishly done, and one of the finest memoirs I've read in years (Sunjeev Sahota)
What a superb, moving and disturbing memoir Catherine Taylor has written. Tracing delicate threads of connection between the political and the personal, evoking the atmosphere of the 80s and early 1990s with uncanny precision. It's haunting and unforgettable. (Jonathan Coe)
This marvellous book is a creature of itself. Memoir? Forget it. Here is prose operating at the level of a lethal instrument (Kirsty Gunn)
The 'addictive, druggy aroma' of Vosene shampoo is just one of the many memories triggered by Catherine Taylor's evocative and stirring memoir . . . The book neatly balances a personal story with an incisive social history of an era, told honestly through working-class eyes . . . An excellent memoir
A frank and challenging mixture of memory and anger and protest, with a strong sense of place and history. It evokes a Sheffield I knew well in the process of evolving into the city it is now - the very place names are resonant with nostalgia (Margaret Drabble)
Sparklingly evocative . . . Taylor illustrates the deep connection between person and place in the construction of identity: here the lines between city and citizen are satisfyingly blurred
As well as a personal story, The Stirrings is also an atmospheric social document . . . delicately written and deeply affecting
A great and devastating memoir (Laura Cumming)
Taylor's memories are deliciously vibrant (Pippa Bailey)
Inspiring in its honesty, unforgettable in its blend of grit and vulnerability (Caroline Sanderson)
Catherine Taylor's memoir The Stirrings is a dark, wry tribute to the Steel City, and her encounters with many of its best-known inhabitants . . . Her findings are presented with both poetry and wit: The Stirrings is a vivid chronicle of a young woman's journey into adulthood, and an equally vivid portrait of a place and moment in time (Holly Williams)
A coming-of-age memoir which charts the author's experiences growing up in 1970s and 80s Sheffield, the evocation of time and place is so good you are almost surprised when you look up and see you are elsewhere
Catherine Taylor's account of her youth is a lyrical study of how place shapes character ... Assured and perceptive . . . She brilliantly evokes the "tiny traumas" of childhood . . . Haunting . . . The reader may wish this memoir were longer
All stars
Most relevant
I really enjoyed this book.
I’m a geordie lass but have lived in Sheffield since 2000 so I know a lot of the places mentioned.
Lots of nostalgia I could relate to.

Loved it

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I loved this memoir. I am a similar age as the author - who also narrates her book with much feeling- and many of her experiences resonate deeply with me. The fear felt by women of going out alone in the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, the student days when the importance of everything is heightened, the internal emotional damage of a parent leaving. This makes it sound quite bleak but she also recalls funny small details of what she ate, drank, and wore. I loved it and would like to read more of her work.

Great memoir of a Sheffield young woman

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