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Mourning Ruby, Helen Dunmore
Penguin
Reviewed by Sheila Forbes (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

This is an unusual and disturbing tale of loss, sometimes perplexing, at times deeply moving.

The story begins with Rebecca, who at two days old was abandoned in a shoe box behind an Italian restaurant. She grows up feeling keenly the lack of a family history or background. Consequently, when she marries Adam, a neonatologist, and gives birth to Ruby, she lavishes on the child all the love she feels was missing from her own childhood. Then there is a terrible accident.

Unable at first to accept that Ruby has gone, and haunted by the conviction that she was partly responsible, the only way she can cope with her devastating loss is to leave her husband and begin a new life as a high-powered executive working for Mr Damiano, a one-time circus performer and now the owner of an international hotel chain. Mr Damiano has his own tale of an accident, not fatal this time, but which nevertheless had a profound and tragic effect on his life and that of his young sister.

It is he who eventually points out to Rebecca that Adam's life must go on, with or without her, and prompts her to consider the future.
Then there is Joe, her former flatmate now living in Russia, where he has written the story of Stalin's wife and now wishes to write about the dictator himself.

Frustrated by his inability to get inside the man's head, and unable to commit himself to a long-term relationship with his lover, Olya, he gives up and writes instead a story about the first world war which he sends in instalments to Rebecca.

Aspiring writers are often told that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end. This book has no end in the conventional sense. It begins with Rebecca's abandonment as a baby, and finishes with a wartime pilot, a character in Joe's book, trying to land his stricken plane. Frustratingly, there is no drawing together of the different threads.