'Funny, poignant, elegantly written, I adored this novel' Amanda Hodgkinson'Wonderful... It's thrillingly written, delicately accomplished and will live in my head for a long time' Lloyd Shepherd
Cara is a dedicated neuroscientist with a research post at Cambridge. Heather is her almost-stepdaughter, drifting towards the end of school, trying to picture a future that fits her. Paul is Cara's partner and Heather's father - and when he suddenly disappears with no explanation, these two very different women, legally and biologically unrelated, need to figure out their place in each other's life.
Set in Cambridge and Las Vegas, each city in its way as artificial as the other,
Pathways is about connections forged and connections failed, and how people struggle to understand themselves and each other. A novel of both the heart and the head, it is perceptive, wry and unexpectedly moving, a love story of deep originality and intelligence.
Industry Reviews
This richly textured novel is composed of seven stories inspired by portraits - the Week on GIRL READING
An impressive debut - Sunday Telegraph on GIRL READING
A real wow of a first novel. The premise is alarmingly simple and yet somehow stunning: seven portraits, seven artists, seven girls and women reading . . . A wonderful, imaginative evocation of seven different worlds . . . It's very rare for a novel to have a real freshness and originality but at the same time to evoke echoes of other literary memories. This feels incredibly clever. It's a book packed full of adventures and stories and you completely lose yourself in them . . . This book's great strength: the perfect, separate, involving worlds it creates. Like Mitchell, Ward is equally adept at shifting between completely different registers and voices . . . It [has] real beating heart . . . It will be fascinating to see what she writes next - The Times on GIRL READING