Marie the teenager and Marie the wife and mother links the two strands of this story of how ordinary people cope with great loss. The more recent strand is narrated by one of the children as he tries to understand what is going on in the adult world. This book gains in intensity as the two stories are pulled closer together. A powerful mix of the everyday and the tragic, you will be drawn into this family making small steps towards recovery.
I wonder whether it's the same for everyone. Whether everyone, if they really thought about it, could pinpoint the one day, the one minute where it all went wrong .... The moment they'd like to go back and carve out of their history like the rotten eye in a potato so that the rest wasn't tainted by the rot. For me, that tiny piece of loose thread that I pulled to trigger the unravelling was when I took the vibrator from Mrs Wilkes' drawer.Â
