Now that Clover is twelve she can have a key to her home while her father drives the local bus and she can remain there alone. She has the allotment to water and tend and then the days of the summer holidays are hers. Inspired by a school visit to a museum and a chance meeting with a curator, Clover ventures into the bedroom that was once her parents and begins to catalogue the vast quantity of her mother’s belongings still stored there. Her father is a hoarder. Clover wants answers and order. What develops is a sensitive, touching tale of father and daughter finding out much about each other and their love. Told in both their voices over one summer it does end up answering Clover’s questions and eventually allows her father to move on. Slow and minutely detailed as objects are examined and ‘displayed’ we follow Clover’s research until, on page 259, Dad is sent home unexpectedly after an accident and emotions erupt. Now we learn of the back story; sad, poignant and tender with some lovely secondary characters.
Clover Quinn was a surprise. She used to imagine she was the good kind, now she's not sure. She'd like to ask Dad about it, but growing up in the saddest chapter of someone else's story is difficult. She tries not to skate on the thin ice of his memories. Darren has done his best. He's studied his daughter like a seismologist on the lookout for waves and surrounded her with everything she might want - everything he can think of, at least - to be happy. What Clover wants is answers. This summer, she thinks she can find them in the second bedroom, which is full of her mother's belongings. Volume isn't important, what she is looking for is essence; the undiluted bits: a collection of things that will tell the full story of her mother, her father and who she is going to be. But what you find depends on what you're searching for.
'A moving and surprisingly funny novel' The Independent
Author
About Carys Bray
Carys Bray was awarded the Scott Prize for her debut short-story collection, Sweet Home. Her first novel, A Song for Issy Bradley, was chosen for Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2015. She lives in Southport with her husband and four children.
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