If I had to pick my favourite novel, I think this might be it. It is absolutely brilliant (I have put Jane Siberry on to type this up, because of the striking similarity to the heroine. Canadian, artist, has lost her real name, even spends time in a hospital not unlike Grace Hospital, ice hockey).
A story of a pretty weird and eccentric family of six – father rescues artist/mother from casual pregnancy in Oxford; mother bi-polar brilliant painter, children all pretty weird. Garfield, the son of the unintended pregnancy, although not told until after his mother’s death, Morwenna completely bonkers daughter, Hedley gay and eventually out and Petroc who was killed in a car accident shortly after impregnating girlfriend.
Told in flashbacks/forwards (which I normally dislike) with a different family member in focus in most chapters, the story gradually becomes clear.
The central motif is probably the six stones, each representing one of the family that Petroc the youngest picks up as a child from a Cornish beach on a birthday trip with Rachel. She has kept and is trying to paint these stones when she had a heart attack and dies in the first chapter, so the picture is never complete – in fact I think she may have thrown it out of her studio attic window. The stones are her family and so the book. Each member of it is beautifully drawn and so by the end the whole thing has a wonderful logic to it.
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