National Network for Equitable Library Service

New fiction from an award-winning author If we are what we own, who are we when we own nothing? When you look in the mirror and ask the person staring back, "Who are you?," do you know the answer? At the age of 46, Anita Hall knows exactly who she is. She has lived with partner Ed for 15 years, and is proud of all they’ve achieved. They go out into the world separately: Ed with one eye on the future in the world of finance; Anita with one foot in the past, a curator at Hampton Court Palace. This is the life she has chosen — choices that weren’t open to her mother’s generation— her dream job, equal partnership, freedom from the monotony of parenthood, living mortgage-free in a quirky old house she adores. The future seems knowable and secure. But then Anita finds herself standing in the middle of the road watching her home and everything inside it burn to the ground. Before she can come to terms with the magnitude of her loss, hairline cracks begin to appear in her perfect relationship. And returning to her childhood home in search of comfort, she stumbles upon the secret that her mother has kept hidden, a taboo so unspeakable it can only be written about. The reflection in the mirror may look the same. But everything has changed. Authentic and heartbreaking, Davis’s intoxicating new novel is an exploration of identity, not as a fixed point, but as something fragile, shape-shifting and transient.