Home truths

by Sara Maitland

There were three possible reasons given for the disappearance of the two hikers on Mount Nyangani: the treacherous terrain and climate, the banditos armados; the forgiving spirit called Chirikudzi. In David's case there was a fourth - that Clare might have killed him. Unable to remember exactly what happened on the mountain in Zimbabwe and trying to come to terms with the loss of her hand in the accident, Clare is taken home to Scotland where her large, loving, questioning, and uncomfortably acute family become almost unbearable. She had wanted David dead, but did that mean she had killed him? Her mother's High Church concern, Anni's sharp-tongued radicalism, saintly Felicity's internal fury, and her deaf niece Alice's fascination with the prosthetic hand seem at first to distract from Clare's problems, until the aristocratic family's pieties pierce her cocoon of post-traumatic amnesia. Family resentments flare and fade, divisions fester and heal, and as Clare uncovers buried fears, sh