Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac
toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently
absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate
island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously
sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures
of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's
skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by
letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class
midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the
suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters
intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly
funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control
children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work.
Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range -
showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great
emotional depth.
