As children, Alison and her older brother Roy were so close that their mother called them by one name: Alroy. On a cool summer morning in 1984, when Alison was fifteen, she woke to learn that Roy was dead.
While her devoutly Catholic parents wrestle with their faith and their grief, Alison makes visitors coffee, eventually goes back to school, and - being all her parents have left - copes.
Or so she tells herself. Alongside the life people see run her private rituals of mourning - she hoards food for her brother, hides in the garden fort they'd built together and waits for him to return.
Eventually, Alison finds her own way to survive: a startling, taboo first love that helps her discover a world beyond being "the girl whose brother died". And the raw shocks of this different kind of love bring her up against the fact that she really hasn't coped at all.
This is in part a book about grief - living with it and failing to recognise it - but it is also a love story: about Alison's love for her brother, of her childhood, and finally of life. As richly realised as a novel, 'Name All The Animals' is a beautiful, absolutely compelling portrait of innocence struggling with loss.
