Washing the Dead and Other Stories

In 1921 Ellen squints into the city sky above Bristol and sees death everywhere. Abandoned by her husband, struggling to keep her family from the worst effects of poverty, Ellen cleans - other people's houses, other people's laundry, the bodies of the dead and finds the courage to face the day. As each story moves us forward a decade we begin to trace connections - a minor character in one decade's story comes into sharp focus. Ties are made - loose, geographic or random. In 1951 Sam has become good at ignoring the cold, but can't ignore his married cousin over the garden wall or the holes that appear in the wall and in his life. In 1961 a wet beach is more inviting than a pokey kitchen and another family argument, and for Tabitha, weighed down by motherhood and marriage, a chance meeting with an elusive woman who dares her to swim far out to sea, resonates down the years. 1981, Becks works as a bus conductor in Cambridge, struggling to fit in, chasing shadows. Beautiful and elusive, Washing the Dead is a collection of linked stories in which aunts and step-parents, abortion, secrets, deceptions and sanity collide across a century of ordinary people who occasionally discover moments of truth. Washing the Dead takes the reader on a journey through time and narratives that intersect, sometimes at tangents, sometimes directly. Throughout, Washing the Dead explores public and private myths and ways in which people weave narratives in an attempt to gain meaning. Time works as a series of loops, so that the future effects the past as much as what has already been experienced leads into the future. These stories are by turns raw, poignant and funny; mindful of the ironies and paradoxes of life. 'Gripping, alive and persuasive... The detail is telling and the story rich... everything's interesting here.' Tessa Hadley -- Publisher: Cinnamon Press