Helen Bain, shortlisted for the 2021 Tony Lothian prize (now the Elizabeth Buccleuch prize) with Court Green: Sylvia Plath in Devon 1961-2, has developed the material she researched for that proposal into a novel, The Daffodil Days (Bloomsbury, 12 March). At the centre of the story are Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, described in the blurb, somewhat exaggeratedly perhaps, as ’20th-century literature’s most infamous couple’. The blurb adds that The Daffodil Days ‘is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this enigmatic pair, refracted through the rich inner lives of a rural community caught – if only for a moment – in their light’.