The Queen of the Tambourine is a 1991 epistolary novel by English author Jane Gardam; it won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel that year.

[2] Set in a wealthy Surrey suburb of South London, the novel takes the form of a series of increasingly bizarre letters written by Eliza Peabody, an interfering neighbour and hospice volunteer.

The letters are written to Joan, who has left her husband and fled the country, and tell of Eliza's own marital and later mental breakdown, as the barriers between truth and fiction break down.

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