Edith, just out of school, has been sent from her quiet English life to rural Italy. It is the 1960s, and her mother has issued strict instructions: tend to her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, in the final weeks of her scandalous pregnancy; help at the birth; make a phone call that will summon the nuns who will spirit the child away to a new home. Decades later, happily divorced, recently moved, and full of new energy, Edith has made a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. Then her best friend Maebh receives a shocking phone call from an American man. He claims to be a brother she never knew existed: a child her mother gave up and never spoke of again. As Edith helps her friend reckon with this new idea of family and how it might change her life, her thoughts turn back to Lydia and her own fractured history. What did they give up when they sent him away? What kind of life has he been given? And how did it change their own lives?
An extended meditation ... Affecting ... Moss’s writing has always been characterised by its range, and the latest novel does not disappoint ... Part of the attraction of this captivating novel is Moss’s curiosity about different ways of knowing.
This evocative distinction between storytelling and action aligns with the novel’s dual narrative, which both connects us to and distances us from this compelling and at times frustrating character ... But while its critiques of contemporary attitudes towards migration, and failures in historical thinking, and the ways some refugees are accepted while others are not, do lose some force, it remains a powerful and beautifully written story of family, friendship and identity.
