of The Supremes before dying an early death. Set in a posh New York apartment in the course of one day in the spring of 1987, the novel contains frequent flashbacks that describe life in a black neighbourhood in the 1950s and 1960s. The book also deals with stardom in the music business and some people's inability, despite their riches, to make their own American Dream come true and to lead fulfilled lives. Hunt indicates that within her novel, all the characters are victims who are also guilty, a reflection of real life where "[w]e get hurt, but we're also hurting each other all the time." Hunt wrote Joy while touring England with a group performing Othello and said her fellow actors made fun of her while she was writing the book; given her reputation, she feels, they may have thought her an aspiring Joan Collins. Hunt says Joy is also about the colourism that existed within black society at the time, where girls with fairer skin and longer hair were preferred to girls with kinky hair and more stereotypically Black characteristics. Hunt said that living in England and exploring its accents taught her how beautiful Black language was, a "culturally important" feature she preserved in her novel. Hunt's second novel, Free, published in 1992, tells the story of freed slaves and their children living in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1913. Hunt's novel Like Venus Fading (1998) is inspired by the lives of Adelaide Hall, known as the "lightly-tanned Venus", Josephine Baker and Dorothy Dandridge. Hunt wrote her first four books whilst living in isolation in a remote hideaway in France called La montagne. With no one for company but a barn cat who came to eat each morning, and the people she saw once a day at a nearby patisserie, she was inspired to write by silence and boredom. Editor In 1999, Hunt sought a job of writer-in-residence at Dublin's Mountjoy Prison and later collected selected writings from the prisoners and edited The Junk Yard: Voices From An Irish Prison. The book contains 15 stories divided into five sections: Childhood, Family Life, The Score, Criminal Life and Prison Life. One publisher was critical of the repetitive themes of urban poverty, addiction, and life in prison, but Hunt responded by asserting that it is worth considering why the inmates had such similar tales to tell. The Junk Yard: Voices From An