Dimensions
129 x 198 x 21mm
When Maude Strong was twenty-five years old, she killed a child.
Every life has at its central core one sentence, the distillation of all the contingency and chaos and randomness that lives are made of: all the hopes and fears and years of striving and failing, the moments of glad grace and the pedestrian routine.
Maude knew her life was no good because at its core was that one ineluctable sentence.
Maude was driving at twenty-eight miles an hour when the child ran out from between two parked cars. No one's fault, said the coroner, but Maude knew that no one else had killed that child, and if the court wasn't going to punish her, she would punish herself.
Ten years on Maude has a life spent in shadows. A life that is no life at all, until a stranger's knock on the door and an unlikely escape to Scotland begin to convince her, almost in spite of herself, that she may have something to lose.