Red Amaryllis

By the mid-1980s, Denise and Michael Jacobs had a baby son, their own hairdressing salon in Darlington, England, and a company built on an idea years ahead of its time: television screens in the backs of taxis. Then came a robbery, a fraud and, as Denise tells it, the loss of almost everything they owned.

Most people would have walked away. Denise and Michael went to court instead, against one of the world’s largest multinational financial institutions. The battle lasted the best part of a decade. They fought it on legal aid and, when that was withdrawn, on their own. Against every expectation, they won.

To win, Denise had to find evidence that nobody believed existed. Time and again, she found it. In Red Amaryllis she describes how she found it, through messages, guidance and moments she could not explain, and includes accounts from people who were there when they happened.

It is the turn in the story, and the point where it stops being only a legal drama. Funny, defiant and deeply human, it is a book that asks you to make up your own mind.

The book begins somewhere else entirely: in a kitchen in Darlington on 28 August 1985, with a baby in a highchair and a woman’s voice telling Denise to look out of the window.

What she saw that day never left her. It is the warning at the heart of Red Amaryllis, and the reason she wrote it.