Dimensions
142 x 221 x 27mm
In 1981 Jenna abandoned her child and drove into the night, never to return. Jenna had been a folk singer, a hippie and radical anti-nuclear activist, who had lived for twenty years in a commune in the remote highlands of Scotland. Her disappearance was reported in the press as a fatal road accident. Her body was never found. Thirty years later her daughter Rowan, suffering from post-natal depression, becomes convinced that she cannot be a real mother unless she discovers what really happened to Jenna. She leaves her baby, her husband and her life in London to take up the search, returning to her childhood home. But times have changed. The commune is shrouded in secrecy, and Rowan is forced to hide her identity in order to seek out the truth. The longer she stays in the commune, the more difficult she finds it to return, and she must battle to stop her future becoming a repeat of her lost mother's past. Close Your Eyes is an intensely moving novel about the enduring bonds of maternal love and the changing role of women since the radical experiments of the 1960s. It tells the secret history of a revolutionary social experiment, and, with unflinching honesty, depicts the impacts, both good and bad, that it had on its children. Evoking the folk songs of the 60s and 70s, Close your Eyes summons back that era and is touched by a gentle, lyrical passion.
