Mummy's Legs (A Virago V)

MUMMY'S LEGS

One day Catherine finds a hair in the shower. It is black, forty-two centimetres long and kinked into peculiar curls as though it has been badly ironed. She sellotapes it to a sheet of typing paper, slots it into an envelope and hides it at the bottom of her underwear drawer. Later, when her ten-year-old daughter lets herself in after school, the house seems to be empty.

Moving between the cherry-lined avenues of elegant South Kensington and an old farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales, Mummy's Legs is a bittersweet tale of childhood. Intimate and wry by turns, it tells a story of life in the topsy-turvy adult world seen through the eyes of a young girl as she tries to fix her mother's broken heart.