First published 2021
Heather knows her mother, Bea, through a lifetime of calculated distance. A freelance graphic designer in Manchester, Heather has constructed careful boundaries around their relationship, parsing decades of manipulation and emotional evasion. When Bea remarries and continues her pattern of self-protective storytelling, Heather must navigate the slim spaces between familial obligation and personal survival. As Bea's narratives unravel—about her failed marriages, her own difficult mother, her persistent victimhood—Heather begins dissecting the family mythology. Each conversation becomes a delicate negotiation: how much compassion can coexist with clear-eyed recognition of damage? With surgical precision, she examines the inherited scripts of feminine survival, the subtle ways generational trauma reproduces itself. Riley's novel reveals the quiet battleground of a mother-daughter relationship, where love and resentment are not opposites, but tangled companions.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: dysfunctional-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Manchester
201 pages · Hardcover · Granta
Content warnings: emotional-abuse