Alison Booth

So that is really quite a soul-destroying moment in her life.

It's only when Pearl comes along that she's given a chance to get out.

And I think we mentioned earlier that everybody chose to go to England.

Well, they certainly did because it was viewed as home.

But in Nora's case, she didn't really choose, not consciously, to go to England when she got the money from her separation fund.

She just spontaneously bought a ticket one day and off she went to the mother country, so-called.

So I thought that was a very interesting entree into her European experience, that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing when pushed out of what had become a loveless marriage.

I took away from it, I guess, my understanding of Nora as an old woman.

imagining she's at the end of her life, although she may not be, and working through these memories she's sort of forced to by her illness and the fact that she's in her childhood home.

And she achieves, I think, a resolution of sorts about her life and about her early memories, which I think is rather lovely.

And the final page, and I'm not going to give away the content of the final page, but that was a very moving description of how she came to terms with a really pivotal event in her childhood.

And so I think ultimately what I took away from this book is that it's an old woman's coming to terms with the life that she's led and achieving a sort of happiness as a result.

I mean, she's come to terms with her sister.

with that unexplained event that she finally understands on the last page.

And now she's lived her life and she can contemplate as she wishes.

So I thought that was a particularly lovely story.

That's one of the reasons that I really enjoyed this book.

That's very interesting.

I think that relates to memories or the creation of memories as a form of propaganda.

I really loved that quote that one of the Facebook group had about memories being imaginations.