Andrea Gillies Libri

Andrea Gillies' brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer's works are interwoven with her mother-in-law's unravelling grasp on reality.

On a hot summer's afternoon, Ursula Salter runs sobbing from the loch on her parents' Scottish estate and confesses, distraught, that she has killed Michael, her 19-year old-nephew. But what really happened? No body can be found, and Ursula's story is full of contradictions. In order to protect her, the Salters come up with another version of events, a decision that some of them will come to regret. Years later, at a family gathering, a witness speaks up and the web of deceit begins to unravel. What is the white lie? Only one person knows the whole truth. Narrating from beyond the grave, Michael takes us to key moments in the past, looping back and back until - finally - we see what he sees.

Nina Findlay, alluring, accomplished, deluded, always the heroine of her own life, has found an irresistible safety in being adored by two men, brothers she's known since childhood. But when her sister-in-law becomes gravely ill, the triangle that Nina's depended on becomes catastrophically unstable. The life she's known begins rapidly to unravel, and odd things begin to happen which those around her insist are all in her mind. Separated from her husband, she goes on holiday to a tiny Greek island, the honeymoon island of 25 years earlier, and is involved in a serious road accident. There, while recuperating, she becomes close to her doctor, who's also on the point of divorce. A new relationship seems possible - but what's real in the situation, and what's imagined? Pressed in on all sides by other people's truths, how can Nina be sure of identifying her own? A diary that was her mother's proves to be a turning point. Perhaps romantic love is always a kind of undiagnosed madness.Face to face with the facts behind her assumptions, the time has come for Nina to unravel the taut knot of her past.