Over

Description

Margaret Forster writes fiction that is profoundlly real, rooted in the everyday experience of apparently ordinary lives that have been twisted out of shape by the messy business of living. Like Carol Shields' Unless, this novel takes a merciless, heartbreaking look at a mother's anguish. Don and Louise's eighteen-year-old daughter Miranda has died in a sailing accident. While Louise takes steps to move on with her life, Don cannot come to terms with the chain of events that led to her death. Instead, he is determined to bring someone to account. The surviving children handle the loss of their sister better than their parents, but what they can't handle is their family being torn apart... Taut, heartbreaking and immensely moving, Over is a novel about love and loss, grief and hope, pain and resolution, and about what happens to human beings when tragedy strikes like lightening.

Born in Carlisle, Margaret Forster was the author of many successful and acclaimed novels, including Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, Is There Anything You Want? , Keeping the World Away, Over and The Unknown Bridesmaid. She also wrote bestselling memoirs - Hidden Lives, Precious Lives and, most recently, My Life in Houses - and biographies. She was married to writer and journalist Hunter Davies and lived in London and the Lake District. She died in February 2016, just before her last novel, How to Measure a Cow, was published.

"Forster's tightly-focused, first-person narrative is utterly compelling and painfully convincing" Daily Mail "Forster's first person account of Lou's emotional exhaustion, her bleached anger at the ruthless egotism of her husband's grief, and her inability to discern the same essential failing in her own bitter self protectiveness is an impressive feat of observation and imagination" The Times "Forster's scrupulous inspection of the clammy and repressive intricacies of domestic life is, as in so much of her discomforting fiction, a serious pleasure to read" Sunday Times "Superb... Forster understands the power of that left unsaid... an ordinary woman's story is made heroic by a writer's art" Sunday Express "Over is a relentless, exacting novel that pushes into the heart of grief and suggests some narrow routes to recovery" Times Literary Supplement