This latest novel from the acclaimed author of the Orange-longlisted The Pink Hotel is an exploration of memories, consequence and the difficulties of living with the past. Cathy is a curator of natural history in Berlin. She is engaged, about to receive an award for her work and beginning to feel that she has finally escaped her past, a past that she keeps locked away within her own museum of curiosities. Yet on the day she is due to receive her award she receives a gift that tells her that a shadow that haunts her memories has resurfaced to claim back what he feels belongs to him.
I was completely swept away with this story. Stothard’s technique allows us to watch events unfold with regular insights into Cathy’s past that slowly reveal the reality of what she has been hiding from with a steadily rising sense of foreboding. I found the exploration of characters sensitively handled and yet provided enough suspense and contained a level of sinister tension that had me guessing just what each one may be capable of. This is exquisite, beautifully written prose and the use of the museum as a theme throughout with setting, a means of storytelling and metaphor, is quite brilliantly executed. It is personal, it is universal and it is something that lives within each of us and the memories we hold. Cathy’s story moved me and I so wanted her to find the escape she desperately needed. Highly recommended. ~ Shelley Fallows
From the author of the Orange Prize long-listed, The Pink Hotel Cathy is a young woman who escapes her feral childhood in a rundown chalet on the East coast of England to become a curator of natural history in Berlin. Although seemingly liberated from her destructive past, she commemorates her most significant memories and love affairs - one savage, one innocent, one full of potential - in a collection of objects that form a bizarre museum of her life. When an old lover turns up at a masked party at Berlin's natural history museum and events take a terrifying turn, Cathy must confront their shared secrets in order to protect her future. This is an exquisitely crafted, rare and original work.
Anna Stothard was born in London. She has written weekly columns in the Observer and the Sunday Telegraph, among other freelance journalism. Her first novel, Isabel and Rocco, was published in 2004. She did her undergraduate degree at Oxford, then moved to Los Angeles where she was awarded a screenwriting scholarship with the Masters programme at the American Film Institute. While studying she lived in a surreal mock-German castle in Little Armenia and worked on film sets for two years and on finishing her MA she returned to London. She lives in Hampstead, London.