Improbable friends Margaret and Lucy navigate their age gap, the cult of personality, graveyards and bad knees: from cult-favourite graphic novelist Joff Winterhart

At this point in her life, septuagenarian Margaret is particular about the things she likes. These include looking out of train windows, graveyards in the rain, an afternoon sherry. But most of all, it is her lifelong subject, the obscure 17th century polymath J.W Preece, who she has devoted her life to studying.

Margaret doesn’t like: drawing attention to herself, extravagant behaviour and television.

When she meets a young history TV producer, Lucy, they form a tentative bond, despite Margaret’s reluctance to be drawn into the media world. Several decades Margaret’s junior, heartbroken and unsure of herself, Lucy finds curious new inspiration as she falls under the spell of Margaret’s passions.

With inimitable sensitivity and humour, cult-favourite graphic novelist Joff Winterhart returns with an irresistible portrait of two women navigating their age gap, loss, self-made-celebrity-historians, and bad knees…

'Just when I thought I couldn’t love Joff Winterhart more, along came Dear Historian. It has all the wry humanity and keen eye for detail that won Driving Short Distances and Days of the Bagnold Summer such passionate fans' PATRICK GALE

'Even in the prose aisles, you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece of literary fiction as nuanced and beautiful as this.' VULTURE, on Other People