Patrons - Babs Horton

In July 2022 we welcomed the award-winning novelist Babs Horton as a Patron of the Plymouth Proprietary Library. She is a long-standing supporter and member of the PPL.

Babs was born in Tredegar, South Wales, and brought up in London. She attended seven different schools, eventually moving to Plymouth where she graduated from the College of St Mark and St John. For ten years she taught English in an Adolescent unit for students with mental health problems.

Babs has taught in many Plymouth secondary schools including Plymouth Hospital School where she worked as a teacher at the Young People’s Centre. She took up a Royal Literary Writing Fellowship at Plymouth University in September 2007.

Her first book A Jarful of Angels (2003) won the Pendleton May prize and was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club first novel award. Other works include Dandelion Soup (2004), Wildcat Moon in (2006), Recipes for Cherubs (2008), The Emporium of Dreams (2016), Winter Swallows (2020) and Holy Mackerel (2021). Her short stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies worldwide.

A JARFUL OF ANGELS (2003)

Four imaginative children. One magical summer. One terrible secret.

'Stoop down and run your fingers through the damp soil and there in the black coal earth you will find the splintered remnants of tiny bones and the fragments of a hundred broken jars, jars that once held so terrible and so marvelous a secret.'

The remote town in the Welsh valleys was a wonderful, magical - but sometimes dangerous - place in which to grow up. It was there that Iffy, Bessie, Fatty and Billy experienced a plague of frogs one summer, stumbled upon a garden full of dancing statues, found a skull with its front teeth missing - and discovered just what it was that mad Carty Annie was collecting so secretly in those jars of hers.

But at the end of that long, hot summer of 1963, one of the four children disappeared.

Over thirty years later, retired detective Will Sloane, never able to forget the unsolved case, returns to Wales to resume his search for the truth. His investigation will draw him into a number of interlocking mysteries, each one more puzzling than the last

Written in a rich, sensuous and lyrical prose style full of the sights and sounds of childhood, A Jarful of Angels is a mesmerising, evocative - and wholly unforgettable - novel of psychological suspense.

DANDELION SOUP (2004)

'Dandelion soup. Favoured dish of saints and martyrs. Provider of sustenance to weary pilgrims. Succour to the dispossessed, nectar of the vagabond and the outcast.'

In the remote Irish village of Ballygurry, middle-aged Solly Benjamin is roused at midnight to find a child on his doorstep, a length of cord tied loosely around her neck. The attached tag bears his own name and address.

Who is she? And why would a complete stranger send her to him? As Solly attempts to find the answers, other Ballygurry inhabitants are drawn into the mystery: the mischievous orphan Padraig becomes involved, as does the kindly schoolmaster Mr Leary, repressed spinster Nancy Carmichael, well-meaning priest Father Daley - and the overbearing, frightening Sister Veronica.

Their enquiries lead to the secluded monastery of Santa Eulalia on the medieval trail to Santiago de Compostela. As the Ballygurry pilgrims begin to thaw in the Spanish sunshine, a number of interwoven mysteries from the past gradually unfurl to rekindle old hatreds - and restore old passions.

WILDCAT MOON (2006)

'A wildcat moon always means change, Archie, whether we want it or not.'

The Skallies, a row of tumbledown houses built on the windlashed coast, was a wild and curious place. A place for people down on their luck. A place where people came to hide.

Ten-year-old Archie Grimble, with his crippled leg and one good eye, lived a miserable existence there until a chance encounter with an unhappy little girl and the discovery of a locked diary set him on a mission to unravel the mystery of a boy who drowned off Skilly Point in August, 1900.

But Archie's investigation was to have unexpected consequences. A shocking murder and an unexplained abduction were to shatter his exciting new world forever.

Only many years later, on his return to the ruined Skallies, does Archie stumble on the final pieces of a puzzle that has haunted him since childhood - and the extraordinary truth about the fate of Thomas Greswode is at last revealed.

RECIPES FOR CHERUBS (2008)

In the summer of 1960, 13-year-old Catrin Grieve is dispatched by her feckless mother to stay with her great aunt Ella at Shrimp's Hotel in the sleepy village of Kilvenny on the Welsh coast.

On arrival, Catrin is dismayed to find that her reclusive, eccentric aunt is not expecting her and, long closed to visitors, the hotel is nothing like the grand place her mother remembers. Behind the boarded up windows, Ella Grieve still lays the cobwebbed tables for dinner and puts warming pans in the beds of invisible guests.

Although a finicky eater, Catrin finds herself fascinated by a 200-year-old, beautifully-illustrated Italian recipe book, Le Ricette per i Cherubini (Recipes for Cherubs), she discovers on the premises. As she discovers more about the history of the book and grows closer to her frail, lonely aunt, Catrin realises that people from the past can sometimes interlace with the present and point a way forward into the future.

THE EMPORIUM OF DREAMS (2016)

Fate has an uncanny way of uncovering the secrets of the past. If the Jackdaw had not stepped out from the Emporium of Dreams just at the moment when an old newspaper blew along Sheepshanks Alley, he would never have read about the death, ten years before of Dulcie Lewis, a young maid from Higgly Hall in far-off Pencarrig.

Had young Mitzi Jonas heeded the KEEP OUT signs on the high walls surrounding Higgly Hall and resisted the temptation to climb into the house through an open window, all would have remained buried.

The deeper the Jackdaw digs, the more unsettled he becomes; there are rumours of insanity and past violence in the Dowty family and when young William Dowty is brought to the Emporium of Dreams in search of a cure for the nightmare that has plagued him since the maid’s death, he realises that he may have stirred up a hornets’ nest.

Mitzi discovers a key hidden in a bar of soap and is convinced that the last occupant of the attic room before the house was abandoned, has hidden treasure somewhere in Higgly Hall. Hell-bent on finding it, she gets ever closer to discovering what happened to Dulcie Lewis and is soon unwittingly entangled in a web of intrigue that has covered over the dark deeds of the past.

As the temperature drops and the snow begins to fall, cutting off Pencarrig from the outside world, Mitzi makes a terrifying discovery and the Jackdaw realises that the stakes are higher than he could ever have imagined and there are people who will go to any lengths to keep their grisly secrets. He must make the long journey from London to Pencarrig, hoping that he is not too late.

On inheriting Higgly Hall after the death of his father, Will Dowty returns for a fleeting visit to the dilapidated house. Opening the front door he is filled with a ridiculous sense of foreboding; the urge to run away like a frightened child. The house has a strange effect on him, invoking snippets of forgotten memories from his childhood and when he discovers a child’s satchel in one of the attic rooms and a bloodstained boot in the laundry room he is convinced that terrible things have happened at Higgly Hall. Beset by the reluctance of the villagers to answer his questions, he is sure that his long-forgotten nightmare holds the key to the mysterious goings on at Higgly Hall and only the old man from the Emporium of Dreams can reveal the unpalatable truth about his family’s dark history.

WINTER SWALLOWS (2021)

Every year as the swallows of the air flew south hundreds of poor children left their homes and walked to Paris to work as chimney sweeps. They were called the Winter Swallows.

In 1895 young Henri Moreau and Sylvie Audache leave home and walk to Paris to work for disreputable sweep master Monsieur Garcia. Life is gruelling and dangerous but improves with the help of the enigmatic peddler of peculiar merchandise, Philippe Marquand. Together Henri and Sylvie take the first steps to realise their dreams until fate plays a series of cruel tricks fracturing their lives.

In 2016 Eliza Findlay goes reluctantly on holiday to France with her father and his new family. In a dilapidated barn she discovers a secret shrine, a curious engraving and a locket containing a strand of red gold hair. Determined to find out who they belonged to Eliza painstakingly uncovers the secrets of the past. She learns the fascinating story of Henri Moreau and Sylvie Audache and how their lives have startling consequences for those that follow. 'Eliza felt strangely calm standing among the dead and she wondered if sometimes time wound backwards, and the lives of the past merged with those who were living as if the line between them was frayed.’

HOLY MACKEREL (2021)

Life is looking up for the inhabitants of a small Welsh town. Wales have won the Grand Slam; sausage rationing has ended, and a birth control clinic has opened in Cardiff. Then, news arrives that the Pope has dispatched a band of zealous priests to the valley, to eradicate filth and depravity, which is a crying shame because the people are just getting to like it. A frisson of fear sweeps through the Catholic congregation and one young woman hurries home from confession and burns her contraceptive device.

Hence, the hapless hero of this story is born, arriving in the world, feet first, weighing in at eight pounds thirteen ounces, smaller than the Christmas turkey but twice as slippery.

Her mother’s prayer for an angelic daughter are swiftly dashed by the antics of this dervish of a child. Aided in her unladylike escapades by her cousin, Joyce Titley, the oracle of all dubious knowledge, who came last in the Bonny Baby competition of 1946.

Together they set out to unravel the mysteries of life, death, sex, education, nakedness, and the mysteries of menopausal mothers.

Until, a voice beyond the grave, brings startling news that will change their lives forever.

In January 2023, Babs and Laura Horton were interviewed at the PPL by Bev Smerdon.

Babs Horton is an award-winning novelist and a patron of the PPL. Her recent play In the Lady Garden had a sellout run in Plymouth. Laura Horton, the Plymouth Laureate of Words, enjoyed a lengthy run in Edinburgh with her play Breathless which opens at the Soho Theatre in 2023.

A preview of the interview can be viewed on YouTube here. For the full interview, contact the library at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.