Could he not put together a memory for her? Perhaps he could become her memory. To build it from fragments, or make it up. And most of all bring back Grace. Her own mother.
John visits his ageing mother Mary in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town.
But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.
In an effort to console his mother before she slips away, John sets out to re-imagine Grace's life, to honour the memory of a grandmother he barely knew.
Reaching from the late 19th century to the present, John's loving recreation of forgotten family history and unspoken maternal grief becomes a moving elegy for the long hidden chain of love, loss, and self-sacrifice which forms each and every generation.
(P)2013 Hodder & Stoughton
