
Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write She also has an insomniac toddler a precocious death-obsessed seven-year-old & 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 & her desire for the pleasures of work & 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 & about women's vexed & passionate relationship with work Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range
- showing her to be both an excellent comic writer & a novelist of great emotional depth