Tag: Novel

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Book Reviews

“The Heart of Everything” by Henrietta McKervey

Irish novelist, Henrietta McKervey’s debut novel begins and ends with an insight into the life and experience of Mags Jensen, an older woman, living alone in a small Irish town, who’s recently been given a Dementia diagnosis. Mags leaves her home one morning to run some errands in town and never comes back. The major part of this beautifully written novel focuses upon her three grown-up children as they try to find their mother, come to terms with her Dementia and deal with the family’s troubled past. It’s testament to McKervey’s writing ability that, though a lot happens and is revealed in this novel, it still feels like a well-developed character study of a family slowly falling apart.

This is the first novel I’ve come across which deals in depth with the theme of people living with Dementia wandering away from home. It’s a common enough experience amongst people living with Dementia and their carers and McKervey handles it with tact and honesty, using the sections focused upon Mags’ experience to give us an insight into her confusion and the way she’s come to distrust her own thoughts. She keeps a notebook full of To Do lists though she regularly forgets what her own notes mean. It’s quite easy to understand how Mags might have become lost, when we try to track her muddled train of thoughts.

It’s equally easy to empathise with the family’s response. They’re anxious about their missing mother. They blame themselves to different degrees: perhaps they’ve not been attentive enough, perhaps they’ve underestimated the progress of her illness. As panic sets in and their efforts to track down Mags using posters, appeals and search parties lead to a series of dead ends, they begin to blame each other. Under pressure, past anxieties and issues bubble to the surface and McKervey expertly reveals how a crisis like Mags’ disappearance can reveal both the worst and the best in families and communities.

Mags’ Dementia and subsequent disappearance forms the catalyst for The Heart of Everything, however, the story, as it unfolds is focused upon her three children and the complicated ways their family is both bonded together and falling apart. It’s a very assured novel for a debut, with so much grounded, believable detail about family dynamics and the way individual family members will deal with something like Dementia in their own, very individual ways. It’s also refreshing to read a Dementia narrative very grounded within the familiar setting of contemporary Ireland. The references and cultural reactions are spot on and really helped to engage me in the story. Another recommended read.

The Heart of Everything was published by Hachette in 2016

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Book Reviews

“The Things We Keep” by Sally Hepworth

For some reason the vast majority of novels and short stories which address the subject of Dementia seem to be focused upon the experience of elderly white women. There are some notable exceptions. However, there is a definite lack of diversity in fictionalised writing about Dementia. As such Sally Hepworth’s The Things We Keep reads like a real breath of fresh air. It focuses upon a young forty year old woman named Anna, who develops early onset hereditary Alzheimer’s and decides to leave her marriage and check herself into a residential care facility so she won’t become a burden on her family. 

Rosalind House is much like every other care facility; the majority of the residents are quite elderly. However, Anna soon befriends Luke, another young resident who is also living with early onset Dementia. The two begin a relationship which quickly becomes sexual and subsequently discover that living with Dementia has removed much of their autonomy. They are no longer allowed to make decisions about their relationship or their bodies. Anna’s brother, concerned about her welfare, insists upon keeping them separate and the care staff are forced to comply with his wishes. This decision soon begins to have a major impact on Anna’s mental and physical health. 

Although The Things We Keep isn’t the kind of novel I would normally read, I enjoyed it immensely. It’s well-written, funny and touching, moving backwards and forwards in time and employing three first person narrators -Anna, Eve (the resident cook), and Eve’s young daughter, Clementine- to help us piece together the events which have led up to Anna’s incarceration in her own room and the depression she’s suffering from. The style might be light and zippy but the themes explored in this novel are incredibly complex and hard-hitting. It asks huge questions about whether people living with Dementia are capable of loving and being part of healthy relationships.

“But even if they loved each other once, they can’t really love each other now, can they? How can you love someone you don’t remember?”

It wrestles with questions around power of attorney and who gets to decide what’s in the best interests of a person living with Dementia. It addresses issues of autonomy and the lack of autonomy often experienced by people living with Dementia. It explores the thorny subject of sexual consent and takes an honest, unflinching look at the depression and mental health issues associated with Dementia. It also does an amazing job of exploring the disparate responses to a Dementia diagnosis with Luke and Anna both reacting to their illness in very different ways.

It’s wonderful and really refreshing to see all these important questions addressed in such an open, natural way although I will say the final chapter of the book felt a little too neat and resolved for me. I’d have preferred a more complex, incomplete and, arguably more believable, ending to Anna’s story. If this had been a literary fiction novel, rather than commercial fiction I think it might have ended in a more inconclusive fashion. There’s a sense here that even though Anna’s story is far from a fairy tale she’s still being offered a version of the happily ever after ending which I don’t think would actually happen under these circumstances. The Things We Keep is still a great read though, and a welcome addition to the canon of Dementia fiction, adding a much need dose of diversity.

The Things We Keep was published by Pan Books in 2016 

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Book Reviews

“The ACB With Honora Lee” by Kate De Goldi

with illustrations by Gregory O’Brien

I absolutely adored The ACB with Honora Lee. It grabbed me the moment I opened it. I’m always on the look out for books which help children and young adults to understand what it’s like living with Dementia and I could instantly see how this book would appeal to mid-Primary aged children and help them process some difficult issues. Gregory O’Brien’s gorgeous illustrations explode across the inside cover and continue throughout, bringing main character, Perry’s thoughts to life in what look to be a series of colourful mind maps. I particularly enjoyed the way the story and illustrations bring different perspectives to the forefront and yet also compliment each other superbly in this short novel.

Perry is an only child with a very inquisitive outlook. Her favourite word seems to be why. She’s trying to figure out the world around her by constantly bombarding the adults in her life with questions. Sometimes she gets the answers she’s after. Often, she feels as if she’s being fobbed off. Perry has a wonderful relationship with her gran, Honora. She’s been Perry’s go to person but now she lives in a retirement home called Santa Lucia. Perry still visits regularly, accompanied by her parents or more frequently, her childminder Nina and Nina’s son Claude. They not only spend time with Honora but form a kind of community with the other residents.

Within a few chapters it is clear that Perry’s gran isn’t the same as she used to be. Gran is confused and sometimes doesn’t even recognise Perry. Perry finds this a bit distressing but instead of abandoning her trips to Santa Lucia, she tries to find a new way for them to connect. She begins to work with her gran on a school project, compiling a quirky and sometimes confused ABC of the older woman’s life. Through the ACB (as Honora calls it), and time spent together, Perry comes to understand a little more of the illness her gran is living with and finds new ways to bond with her as she now is.

The strength of The ACB with Honora Lee is to be found in the way Kate De Gold allows us to see Dementia through the eyes of a young child. Perry describes and explains things in her own childlike way and I found the tone she takes incredibly reassuring.

“So far, all Perry knew about Gran was her name – Honora Lee- and her age – seventy-six years old – and that she didn’t have a husband or much memory any more, which was why she lived at Santa Lucia and could never get Perry’s father’s name right.”

The book is an excellent resource for children who are learning how to live with a loved one who has Dementia. The tone is upbeat, fun and full of little quirks and yet the book doesn’t shy away from some of the harsher realities of living with Dementia. There are plenty of opportunities presented by the story for talking about the sad and difficult changes Dementia can bring about. However, the message comes across loud and clear in both the written text and the illustrations. A special friend or loved one living with Dementia is still the same special friend or loved one. There are ways in which to continue enjoying your time with them and, if you’re anything like Perry, you might even learn something in the process.

The ACB with Honora Lee was published by Hot Key Books in August 2015 

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Book Reviews

Elizabeth is Missing– Emma Healey

Debut author Emma Healey won the Costa Book Awards in 2014 for Elizabeth is Missing, a clever and gripping novel about a woman who is trying to solve a decades old crime whilst living with Dementia. The novel is narrated by Maud, an elderly lady who is increasingly confused about both the world around her and important events from her past. Maud’s good friend Elizabeth hasn’t come to visit in quite some time and Maud is becoming extremely worried about her. She pesters the GP and repeatedly phones Elizabeth’s son in the middle of the night. She drives her own daughter Helen crazy with constant questions about Elizabeth. Maud’s distress is amplified by the fact that Dementia is blurring the line between past and present. Elizabeth’s disappearance has become muddled in her mind with the disappearance of her older sister Sukey, seventy years previously. Memories of the two women blend and intertwine inside Elizabeth’s head.

“Perhaps I should put a note through Elizabeth’s door. Just to say I’ve been. Just to say I was looking for her, in case she comes back. Dad did that for Sukey.”

Maud is the ultimate unreliable narrator. She can no longer hold her own train of thought and this makes it difficult for the reader to keep track of her investigations as she takes notes, searches for clues and tries to follow leads, hoping to find out what’s happened to Elizabeth and, by default, Sukey. It’s difficult to process which pieces of information offered by Maud are true and which red herrings, or misinterpretations. We’re not sure which case is real and which a figment of Maud’s imagination. Though possessed by the notion that she’s on some kind of urgent quest -a common occurrence in people living with Dementia- at times Maud doesn’t know what she’s trying to accomplish herself.

“Even if I knew what I wanted, how could I ever find it? ‘I’m looking for something,’ I say to the man, ‘I just can’t recall, you know.”

Whilst I have some reservations about the use of Dementia as a narrative device -here, as a vehicle for solving a mystery- and I think the novel’s conclusion is a little too neat, Elizabeth is Missing is still an interesting glimpse into the experience of a person living with Dementia. It’s rare to find a first person narrator with Dementia employed throughout the entirety of the book and the range and scope of Maud’s experience -thoughts, memories, interpretations and dialogue- offers a really comprehensive snapshot of both what it’s like to live with Dementia and the resulting confusion, and how other people react to the condition. For me, the standout moments in the novel are those sections where Maud gives the reader insight into how she’s treated and viewed by her family, healthcare professionals and the other people she comes across. These sections read as extremely realistic and quite illuminating. Elizabeth is Missing is also an infinitely readable novel with a clever, well-structured plot and Maud is a genuinely likable and complex protagonist who I enjoyed spending time with.

Elizabeth is Missing was published by Viking in 2014

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Book Reviews

“Summerwater” by Sarah Moss

Summerwater is English writer, Sarah Moss’s seventh novel and occupies familiar territory. Moss writes particularly eloquently about the complicated and often fractured relationships which make up the nuclear family. In Summerwater her gaze falls upon a handful of different families who have chosen to spend -what appears to be the wettest summer ever- in a chalet park in the Scottish Highlands. There’s nothing much to do and little means of escape with the rain pouring down incessantly. Trapped inside their tiny chalets, the characters in Moss’s novel begin to interrogate their own family dynamics and closely observe how the other families are navigating this same bleak experience. 

Set across the course of a single day which ends tragically around midnight, each chapter in Summerwater explores a different character’s point of view through a close third person narration. As with all of Sarah Moss’s writing this is a tightly observed and incredibly effective and affecting piece of writing. Moss excels when she explores what it means to be human in community and the dreadful isolation which can still be felt within a family unit. Her writing is shot through with little vignettes of family life which are oh so familiar, and rendered with warmth, wit and dignity. (I especially loved her description of Justine attempt to wrestle her way into a sports bra and almost dislocating her shoulder in the process).

Early in the novel we meet David, a retired doctor who is holidaying in his privately-owned chalet with his wife, Mary. From David’s narrative we begin to piece together that Mary is most likely displaying the early symptoms of dementia whilst David is doing his best to set his professional judgment aside and convince himself there is nothing wrong with her. Later in the novel, Mary gets a chapter to herself. The way she thinks about and articulates her growing confusion is a particularly interesting example of a character whose inner life is at odds with the outer image she’s attempting to portray. Mary has just become aware of her condition. She is beginning to misplace nouns and confuse old memories. Though willing to acknowledge that something’s wrong, she is just as reluctant as her husband to take steps towards dealing with the problem.

“You mind your own business, she wants to say, but she says, oh, just going through my bag, it’s getting a bit heavy. Looking for the thing. Looking for the word for the thing. He’d only worry, or take her off to the doctor, and they can’t do anything, can they, about -well, about this kind of thing. If that’s what it is.”

Like all the characters in Summerwater, David and Marys’ story highlights a fundamental failure in communication. None of these characters are being honest with each other. In David and Mary’s case, they’re not even being honest with themselves. And if language and conversation are already failing this couple so early in their experience of Dementia, it does not bode well for their future together. Whilst the section which engages with Dementia only occupies about a fifth of Summerwater it’s still an essential compelling read, which manages to capture in 200 short pages, the essence of human disconnection. Tellingly, Mary’s chapter in the novel, ends with these stark, but poignant lines.

“He is still looking at her.

She does not look back.”

Summerwater was published by Picador in August 2020

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“Rain Birds” by Harriet McKnight

Australian writer, Harriet McKnight’s debut novel, Rain Birds is set in rural Australia, on the edge of the wild and beautiful Murrungowar National Park. McKnight has a wonderful ability to capture the natural world in her writing and I particularly enjoyed the way this novel interweaves the personal experience of how dementia impacts a couple’s relationship, with themes of global and environmental responsibility. It’s pretty obvious from the outset that McKnight knows and understands the world she is writing about.

Alan and Pina have spent thirty years living together in isolated Boney Point, when Alan begins to develop early-onset Alzheimer’s. Pina feels as if she’s losing contact with her partner as he starts to forget things, lose his language capability and disappear into his own head. Then the arrival of a flock of rare, black cockatoos offers them a means of connecting, both to each other and the moment they’re currently living through. Conservation biologist, Arianna, is also obsessed with the black cockatoos. She’s trying to encourage them back to their natural breeding site before the flock dies out. Pina wants the birds to stay in her backyard where Alan can get the comfort and benefit of seeing them every day. Both women bring their own agenda to the issue of the cockatoos. Neither is being deliberately selfish but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution to their problem. Either Alan will suffer or the birds will ultimately be put at risk. McKnight uses this small, and very localised dilemma, to highlight much bigger environmental issues. 

Rain Birds is essentially Pina’s story. She’s struggling to come to terms with Alan’s Alzheimer’s, (“I have to stop thinking of him as if he’s already dead,”) and fixates on the black cockatoos as a means of preserving some degree of connection with him. As the novel progresses, she becomes more and more irrational about the birds, losing perspective as she tries to hold on to the one aspect of her life with Alan which she can actually control. 

The novel includes some incredibly honest and very recognisable insights into what it’s like to live with a partner who’s developed Dementia,

“How she followed him around in circles, shutting drawers, finding his jacket in with the crockery, the milk left under the sink with the cleaning stuff, directing him to the bathroom when he couldn’t find it, the tantrums, the anger, the forgetting, always the forgetting. The way it could all turn a woman slowly insane.”

McKnight effectively uses the cockatoo situation as an extended metaphor for all Pina’s frustrations and disappointment. In the specific and personal she finds grounds to explore big universal themes of anger, control and loss. Rain Bird’s a wonderful novel, beautifully written and full of rich descriptions of the natural world. It’s one of the first accounts of Dementia and environmental issues I’ve come across. I sincerely hope to read more. 

Rain Birds was published by Black Inc in 2017 

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“Burnt Sugar” by Avni Doshi

Burnt Sugar is Avni Doshi’s debut novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. Set in Pune, India it is narrated by an artist named Antara who is struggling to come to terms with her past as she tries to work out how to care for her mother, who is living with early onset Dementia. This is a painfully honest look at caring for a close family member who isn’t particularly likeable.

“I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”

Tara has not been a particularly caring mother. Abandoning her loveless marriage, she brought young Tara up in a strange and sometimes frightening ashram, then briefly chose homelessness for the two of them just to spite her affluent parents. Antara has been dragged along on this crazy adventure, for the most part, reluctantly. Now, a fully grown adult and about to become a mother herself, Antara is thinking about her past and some of the bad decisions her mother has made. Unfortunately, Tara doesn’t remember their shared past in the same way. Both women feel the other is culpable for the mess they’ve made of their relationship. But with Tara’s increasing confusion, it’s almost impossible to know who’s telling the truth.

“It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done. It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time.”

Antara resents the way her mother has brought her up and yet feels compelled to care for her as the Dementia renders her increasingly reliant on others. Tara doesn’t make the process of reconciliation easy. She constantly contradicts her daughter’s take on events and eventually sets fire to her studio, destroying all her artwork. Antara interprets this act as an attempt to erase her identity.

The novel wrestles with complex questions about matriarchal relationships: these women can’t seem to exist without the other, yet also appear to be hell bent on destroying each other. Their narratives are in conflict, yet they also seem to have shaped each other’s stories and their own particular ideas of truth.

“Sometimes I think I am becoming my mother.”

“Reality is something that is co-authored.”

Burnt Sugar also explores the role of women within Indian culture, interrogating class and gender assumptions and how both have evolved over the span of Tara’s lifetime yet still have a long way to go. The novel is rich in cultural description and paints a powerful picture of how Dementia is viewed within a non-Western culture. I particularly enjoyed the scenes describing everyday domestic life and the culture which exists around food. It’s refreshing to read a depiction of someone living with Dementia who isn’t an elderly, white, middle-class woman. I’d like to read more narratives like this. I thoroughly enjoyed Burnt Sugar and found the character of Tara both intriguing and extremely frustrating. I can understand Antara’s reluctance to become her mother’s fulltime carer. A trying person who develops Dementia is usually just as trying as before their diagnosis, oftentimes more so.

Burnt Sugar was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2020

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“The Latecomer” by Dimitri Verlhurst

Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer

Meet Désiré Cordier, a very unusual kind of hero. Fed up with the drudgery of retired life, hen-pecked by a bossy wife and irritated by his extended family, retired librarian Désiré hatches a cunning plan. He will gradually feign the symptoms of Dementia until he lands himself a place in a retirement home and a much-needed dose of peace and quiet. All goes according to plan. Désiré is able to fake his way through the memory test his doctor sets him and soon finds himself a resident in Winterlight Home for the Elderly.

“On paper it seemed easy enough: I would more or less crumble away like one of those lonely bluffs you see in Westerns. Slowly, but inexorably, with something resembling grandeur, I would blur and gradually disappear in the mist I myself was discharging.”

However, his plan doesn’t live up to expectations. Constantly feigning Dementia isn’t an enjoyable way of living. He’s beset by daily indignities and frustrated at his own limitations. He’s also shocked to discover he’s not the first resident to have come up with a similar exit plan. Plus, the retirement home isn’t as safe as he’d hoped -he’s sharing his living quarters with a war criminal- and Rosa Rozendaal, his childhood crush is too advanced in her own Dementia to return his amorous advances. It isn’t long before Désiré begins to question the wisdom of what he’s done.

Ably translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, Verhulst’s short novel is a darkly comic exploration of life within a retirement home. It’s funny, honest, sometimes brutally so, and full of well-placed observations about the staff, the residents and the visitors. By crafting a protagonist who’s feigning Dementia Verhulst offers the readers a unique insight into how a person with Dementia is treated and perceived by the people around him. In the following section he describes his daughter’s final visit to Winterlight.

“She could no longer bear to visit someone who didn’t recognise her. The only man she was willing to recognise as her father had dissolved in the mists of his own memory. This was going to be her last trip to this den of misery, her final symbolic visit, to round it all off.”

In normal circumstances a person living with advanced Dementia might be incapable of articulating the experience with the insight and eloquence we get from Désiré. The first person narrative is incredibly affecting. By the time we get to the end of the novel and, like Désiré, realise his family and the people who care for him can no longer see him for the person he is, we understand his frustration and empathise with his lack of autonomy. The Latecomer is a clever novel which uses a bold plot device to place the reader firmly in the shoes of a person living with Dementia. As such, I think it’s a really useful read.

The Latecomer was published by Portobello Books in 2015 

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“Unbecoming” by Jenny Downham

Jenny Downham’s Young Adult novel about three generations of women has received rave reviews and I can absolutely see why. Unbecoming is a gripping read from the very first sentence.

“It was like an alien had landed. Really, it was that weird.”

Seventeen year old Katie’s estranged grandma comes crashing into her life in dramatic fashion. Mary has been left alone and in need of care after her partner dies suddenly. Katie knows nothing about the woman who abandoned her mother as a baby and can’t understand why her mum seems so reluctant to welcome this intriguing, imaginative older lady into their home when she’s so obviously in need of help. Katie’s mum has her own reasons to distrust Mary, besides her family is already quite complicated: Katie’s father has moved in with his girlfriend, whilst her younger brother Chris has complex, special needs. Katie herself is having a turbulent summer. Her relationship with her mother comes under strain as she begins to embrace her identity as a lesbian and experiences her first romance.

Mary brings fun, excitement and stories about the past into Katie’s life. She brightens up Katie’s dreary family life as together they work on piecing together the older woman’s memories. But Mary isn’t always easy to live with. Her Dementia means she requires constant care. Sometimes she remembers the past in short, lucid bursts. Sometimes she doesn’t know where she is or how to manage the simplest tasks. 

“Every morning I think I can do things, and by the afternoon it turns out I can’t.”

Mary’s Dementia is at the stage where she understands that something’s gone wrong but doesn’t know how to fix it. She’s prone to wander away from home and sometimes has outbursts. She’s desperate to be reconciled with her daughter and her grandchildren but her scattergun attempts at explaining the past and her own mistakes often lead to more upset. Unbecoming is a novel which questions the very idea of truth. If Mary remembers things one way and her daughter remembers the same incidents differently, who’s to say which version is right and whether the confusion associated with Dementia renders the person remembering less reliable or more inclined to speak the truth without considering the consequence?

“Mary had her version of the time she came to stay and Mum had hers…All the threads bind and twist together. And every time you look it’s different, because stories change in the telling.”

This is an incredibly readable novel. I flew through its almost 450 pages. It explores a whole range of themes -intergenerational relationships, LGBTQ, feminist and mental health issues, alongside Dementia- through the central narrative arc of unpicking the complexities of Mary’s life. The third person narration allows Downham to give us an overview of every character’s perspective and also to dip frequently into the past. The writing is moving and eloquent and the ending, resolved enough to feel satisfactory, yet far from cheesy or forced. There are so many things I enjoyed about this novel but what I loved most is the honest, funny and occasionally irreverent relationship between Katie and her grandma. If anything, Unbecoming is a romance. It’s the story of two women separated by a family rift, finding each other in the nick of time and very quickly falling in love.

Unbecoming was published by David Fickling Books in 2015