Katherine Millar is eighteen, and desperate for lots of things - to be thinner and less swotty, and to have cooler friends. But most of all she wishes that she had two parents instead of one grandma, Poll.

Katherine's father, Poll's adored only son, was killed in a car crash when she was a baby. According to Poll, the crash was the fault of Katherine's mother, who disappeared shortly afterwards and hasn't been seen since. Poll is pushing seventy, half-blind and utterly poisonous. Her ambition is for things to stay exactly the same for ever, and for Katherine never to leave their pit village of Bank Top; indeed for her to leave the house only when strictly necessary.

Katherine has other ideas, especially when on her birthday she receives a mysterious parcel of glamorous, grown-up clothes - so unlike the ones Poll makes her wear. And then the handsome and self-assured Callum turns up, claiming to be a cousin she never knew she had. Katherine can feel that change is coming; the omens are all around her. In the meantime, she cleans up after Poll, revises for her exams, watches daytime television and surfs the net at the library trying to find out how to be bulimic. What she doesn't quite realize yet is that life won't always wait for you to catch up.

Swallowing Grandma is a perceptive, vivid and painfully funny novel about the ties of love and hatred, and the ways in which our versions of the past can thwart our visions for the future. In Katherine and Poll, Kate Long has created two unforgettable characters locked in an epic battle over whose side of the story will ultimately prevail.