Book description
>And most of all, she is reminded of her own child.
Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son
out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to
this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for
this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and
propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and was
now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they
could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile
relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her
children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least,
powerless to bring back the boy she had known.
Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, this is the parallel story
of a girl and a boy separated by centuries. The circumstances are very
different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What happens
when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in
memory or in history? And how is a mother to cope when love - however
absolute, however unconditional - is not enough to save her child?>
'Honest, affecting and noble' Mark Lawson, Guardian 'Julie spells out
her pain in prose that's so pure, so literal and so terribly engrossing
it makes you weep. And she doesn't flinch from revealing everything -
including her own insecurities and inadequacies as a mother ... by the
end of this excruciatingly sad book, it is very clear that she didn't do
this for art, but for love' Daily Mirror 'Devastating in its candour'
Daily Telegraph 'It is impossible not to empathise' The Times >And
most of all, she is reminded of her own child.
Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son
out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to
this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for
this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and
propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and was
now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they
could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile
relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her
children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least,
powerless to bring back the boy she had known.
Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, this is the parallel story
of a girl and a boy separated by centuries. The circumstances are very
different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What happens
when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in
memory or in history? And how is a mother to cope when love - however
absolute, however unconditional - is not enough to save her child?>
