ABOUT
THE BOOK

Bill Chambers has come home from the Second World War with several fingers of his right hand missing but with his will to restore his family life intact. He wants the best for his wife, Sylvia, and his children, Patrick, Paul and Daphne, and with his steady job at the hardware store the future stretches out before him.

So opens Bonnie Burnard’s brilliant, superbly crafted novel about three generations of an ordinary smalltown family from the 1950s to the 1990s. Through years of family rituals – weddings and funerals, births and holidays – generations intertwine, pull apart, come together again. As the family members spread out from their small town into the larger world, the bonds deepen and widen, sometimes fray. Loyalties are tested by time and chance, people resort to necessary, self-preserving lies, and love creates its own snares. Each character must live out his or her own destiny, not knowing what triumphs or tragedies lie ahead. Burnard has created people we can all recognise and her compelling characterization cuts close to the bone.