The Ha-Ha (Faber Editions)

I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules ... I wanted to tell them all about the animals, but would they understand?
A tea party at an Oxford college. Earnest undergraduates in floral dresses clink cups, discussing essay-crises, punting, summer balls. But to one student, they are grotesquely transformed: she is sitting among ominous armadillos with scaly shells, buzzing with black flies. Then, the laughter comes. As she is engulfed by mirthless hysterics, the Principal has no choice but to send her away.
Josephine's entrance into the world of other people wasn't what she imagined. Since her mother's death, reality seems a badly painted canvas, viewed through the wrong end of a telescope; she always thinks the wrong things, cowed by the brightness of existence. It is a relief to belong, for once, within the mental institution where she is taken. But eventually, she must reintegrate with society-and through a transformative encounter with a fellow patient, a return to real life seems possible ...
Winner of the 1961 James Tait Black Prize

Jennifer Dawson (1929 - 2000) was born in London to a family of Fabian socialists. She read History at Oxford, where she was hospitalised for a breakdown. After graduating, she worked as a teacher, dictionary indexer and welfare worker. Her experience both as a mental health professional and a patient inspired her 1961 debut The Ha-Ha, which won that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize as well as being adapted for the stage and broadcast by the BBC. In 1959 Dawson was awarded the Dawes Hicks Scholarship for Philosophy to study at UCL. She was committed to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and met her husband during the 1963 Aldermaston March. They lived in Oxfordshire, where she wrote six more novels and short stories. She died in 2000.
Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016. In 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize, the A. M. Heath Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river.