Like all writers of note, Rachel was an acute observer from childhood; she would bow to no one in her memory for the precise tragicomic detail of schooldays in the 1980s – the lip gloss, the Phil Oakey hair, the romantic betrayals. She grew up mostly in Sheffield, where her father was an academic, a lecturer in botany, at the university. There were, though, in the midst of this South Yorkshire childhood, three years in which the family lived in Israel and Rachel, from the age of 10, went to a Church of Scotland school in Jaffa, outside Tel Aviv, one of the few places where Arab and Jewish children were taught together. The dislocation, you suspect, and the excitement, helped develop in her the two key gifts of her writing: the ability to make intimate connections immediately and an outsider’s storytelling eye.
