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Shadow Child
On sale
16th July 2009
Price: £9.99
A powerful novel from Radio 4 presenter and Times columnist Libby Purves, inspired by the loss of her own son.
‘Family love is one of the most powerful elemental forces on earth, and at that moment, our last moment as a unit of three, we rode a great curling triumphant wave of it, all together. Death may have thought that he won, but I think otherwise.’
There is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Marion and Tom are doing their dignified best, but their own relationship is taking a battering.
So when a fierce, strange woman turns up and demands to see the dead boy, Marion is almost glad of the distraction. Against Tom’s wishes, she determines to find out more about her son’s life away from home.
The quest takes her out of her comfortable, conventional world to a shabby office in East London, and a series of shocks. Tom, furious, finds his own solution, and amid scandal, sorrow and exaltation the quiet Middle-Englanders discover that there is more than one kind of family.
‘Family love is one of the most powerful elemental forces on earth, and at that moment, our last moment as a unit of three, we rode a great curling triumphant wave of it, all together. Death may have thought that he won, but I think otherwise.’
There is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Marion and Tom are doing their dignified best, but their own relationship is taking a battering.
So when a fierce, strange woman turns up and demands to see the dead boy, Marion is almost glad of the distraction. Against Tom’s wishes, she determines to find out more about her son’s life away from home.
The quest takes her out of her comfortable, conventional world to a shabby office in East London, and a series of shocks. Tom, furious, finds his own solution, and amid scandal, sorrow and exaltation the quiet Middle-Englanders discover that there is more than one kind of family.
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Reviews
Strongly recommended
Purves' sensitive, lyrical descriptions of brave grief had me in floods more than once
The arresting new novel by one of our best-loved writers
Through this lively, often funny, topical story of discovery and reconciliation, ultimately of love, Libby Purves touchingly and truthfully explores and extends the conventional idea of family.
Libby Purves writes with great humanity in this engrossing novel that reveals there is more than one kind of family.