A powerfully emotional story. Flipping around the life of the fictional Lara Moorhouse as she uses the creation of a book to explore and try to make sense of the sometimes painful memories of her and her family's lives. Lucy Collins most recent novel, The Meeting Point, won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2011.
When Lara was twelve, and her younger brother Alfie eight, their father died in a helicopter crash. A prominent plastic surgeon, and Irishman, he had honed his skills on the bomb victims of the Troubles. But the family grew up used to him being absent: he only came to London for two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic, where he met their mother years before, and they only once went on a family holiday together, to Spain, where their mother cried and their father lost his temper and left early. Because home, for their father, wasn't Earls Court: it was Belfast, where he led his other life... Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother, All the Beggars Riding is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past just as she realises that time is running out
