A beautifully told story of war and dementia. Luke is serving in Afghanistan. His grandmother Anne is slipping into dementia in her sheltered flat in Scotland. This powerful and moving book tells their linked stories and draws us back into Anne’s past. So we follow two stories, Anne descending into a shadowy world of her own and thinker Luke in an all too real and horrific one. Both are beautifully realised. In the final section the two come together and Luke takes Anne to Blackpool where he learns about his grandmother’s life as a photographer and hears family secrets long buried. This is a terrific book, once started you will find it difficult to draw away. It is great stuff from a writer at the height of his powers. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
Standing one evening at the window of her house by the sea, Anne Quirk sees a rabbit disappearing in the snow. Nobody remembers her now, but this elderly woman was in her youth a pioneer of British documentary photography. Her beloved grandson, Luke, now a captain with the Royal Western Fusiliers, is on a tour of duty in Afghanistan, part of a convoy taking equipment to the electricity plant at Kajaki. Only when Luke returns home to Scotland does Anne's secret story begin to emerge, along with his, and they set out for an old guest house in Blackpool where she once kept a room.
Andrew O’Hagan is one of his generation’s most exciting and most serious chroniclers of contemporary Britain and the part it plays in the world. He has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is editor at large of the London Review of Books and he lives in London.
