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eBook Category: Mainstream/Mystery/Crime
eBook Description: 'At Paradise Jazz, myths became legends and legends took off their coats and played the kind of blues to leave blisters on your soul.' Kat Pomfret's colourful debut novel explores what happens in a small town when big secrets collide. A novel about family, history and identity, Paradise Jazz tells the story of two women who have to confront a violent and secret past. The stories of Georgetown Easy, looking for a father last seen in Texas 1978, and Helena Jones, who wants to forget the past as much as her great aunt wants her to remember it, twist round one another in the small but complex world of the novel, in which 'life is like jambalaya, on the one hand nothing to hold it all together and on the other, Lord you try unpicking one thing from another.'

eBook Publisher: Snowbooks/Snowbooks
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2007

Georgetown lies thirty degrees north of the equator and ninety-eight degrees west of the Prime Meridian. The distance from Georgetown to Washington is over 1,000 miles. The distance to the Texas state capital is twenty-three miles, as the crow flies. The population of Georgetown is 29,000; the approximate number of families, in thousands, is six. These are the things I know about Georgetown, Texas. It?s this Georgetown, and not Georgetown South Carolina or Georgetown Washington that I am named for. I know also that even before my mother was born in Rock Street, Georgetown, Texas, USA, that the Comanche, Apache and Kiowa lived there and that beneath the town are caverns containing soda straws, mastodons and dire wolves. I do not wish to know what a dire wolf is. I know I was conceived at a place called Booty?s Crossing near the banks of a river whose name I have forgotten and there is a fire-fighting museum near the mall. This is so you get a sense of history. So you don't think I?ve sprung out of nowhere rootless and open-mouthed. I just remembered something else about Georgetown: something or someone is called Blue Hole. This is no way to begin. But if it?s background you?re after, the history of our family is one great void. Before my grandma, who I guess must have cracked herself out of an egg, or been created from the Lord?s own wishbone, there is nothing but soda straws and San Antonio. My world is a shrunken world. It is a world only of my mother, of Tantie (Tantie is my auntie who got pregnant four summers after my mother) and her husband, Jimmy, and, in the far and distant past of my childhood, Sanderson Miller. There are holes in this world the size of Africa, the shape of a father. There are things we talk about and things we don't talk about. Breaking this rule is like trying to walk on the ceiling: you're only going to get yourself hurt. We?ve got twenty years of roots here in England, ten back in Texas, and before that, nothing. The history of my family is blank as the desert horizon. The past is mile after mile of empty sand, with nothing to mark the end of one story and the beginning of another. My growing up was poetic; the kind that everybody likes to read about but nobody wants to have. In print, my childhood was one gigantic laugh-out-loud Christmas TV spectacular (things are certainly funnier in the past tense than the present) but the truth is, for Mom, Tantie, Jimmy and me, life was like jambalaya; plenty of flavour and lots of good things but, looked at one way, nothing to hold it all together, and, looked at another, Lord, you try unpicking one thing from another. And the unravelling begins for the firsttimewithabowlofsugardoughnuts, begins over again with a first-class ticket for flight 181 and a bottle of Freixenet, then begins for real the night Sanderson Miller walked into Paradise Jazz and heard a soul-dark girl singing white-hot blues.