Obituary: Joan Brady, ballet dancer turned novelist who won the Whitbread in 1993 for ‘Theory of War’

Novelist Joan Brady married her mother's lover

Telegraph Obituaries
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Joan Brady, who has died aged 84, cut short a promising career as a dancer with the New York City Ballet under George ­Balanchine; married her mother’s lover, on whom she had set her heart at the age of three; moved to Totnes in England and became a novelist, winning the Whitbread Book of the Year for her 1993 Theory of War, about a young white boy sold into slavery in post-Civil War America.

It was, in fact, a true story about her own grandfather, the son of a Union veteran and one of “a crop of kids nobody wanted”, as the novel put it. Theory of War was praised by The Spectator as “one of the most remarkable and accomplished fictions to come from these islands perhaps since William Golding’s great seafaring trilogy”, its anger and vast subject compressed into 209 disciplined pages.