ABOUT
THE BOOK

David is a museum curator whose assumptions about his own history are suddenly shattered and whose search for identity forms the narrative spine of the book. Eleanor escapes from an Aberdeen shipbuilding family and the darkly scornful influence of her mother into a new life for which she slowly loses her nerve. How do these two people connect, learn about each other, make sense of the stories of their lives? How do they cope with the failures and disappointments, the successes, of their marriage?
The narrative, emerging through the photos, letters, and artifacts which form David’s personal archive, ranges across wartime London, post-war Coventry and Aberdeen, rural Ireland; driven forward by a yearning search for meaning and coherence and truth. But the story always comes back to David and Eleanor, and to their quiet attempts to hold together something which they began before they could even understand what it was. So Many Ways To Begin is a story about the possibilities of love.