Iris Langley is forced to take charge when her mother, Grace, has a stroke. This is no easy task: Iris suffers from the lingering effects of a near-fatal fall as a child. The accident turned her mind into a place where a dragon lives: one that roars in her ears and fills her head with smoke.
As her mother retreats into dementia, Iris realises that Grace is hiding something — a secret about that fateful day in the mountains that could threaten everything she believes about herself and her family. But with her own memory fragmented, and Grace’s mind in tatters, how can she find the truth?
Set against the sombre beauty of the Drakensberg mountains, Bridget Pitt’s powerful new novel takes us into the labyrinthine world of brain injury, and reveals how the strands of guilt, secrecy and devotion that bind mother to daughter may devastate or redeem them.
‘The struggle to forget, or not; courage in small things — Bridget Pitt’s new novel has found a voice for wounded memory. It’s a searching voice, evoking from jumbled discards something that perhaps we’ve all lost … but which might still be found.’ — Jeremy Cronin
