Close Your Eyes

'Close Your Eyes is an astonishing book. It manages to be both clear-eyed and harsh, compassionate and just. It takes us right to the heart of the turbulent social changes that defined our last quarter century and it is a revealing, honest, searing novel about mothers and children, about what it means to be part of a family. The story, the writing, the moral intelligence: all of it is a knock out' Christopher Tsiolkas, author of The Slap In 1981 a mother abandoned her child and drove into the night, never to return. Her disappearance was reported in the press as a fatal road accident. Her body was never found. Thirty years later, Rowan has a child of her own. Afflicted by post-natal depression, she is convinced that she'll hurt her daughter unless she unpicks the mystery of her past, buried deep within a commune in the remote highlands of Scotland. Leaving her young family and life in London, she returns to her childhood home to find a failed utopia shrouded in secrecy. And there, with a looming cult leader, among the rites and rituals, the sacraments and ceremonies, is a single postcard dated a week after her mother's death. As she draws ever closer to the truth about her mother, she fears she might lose even herself.