This Family by Kate Sawyer:

I have been an evangelist for Kate Sawyer’s first novel The Stranding since it was published eighteen months ago.  I’ve frequently described it; to people who read my blog, people in it’s general vicinity in bookshops, when I’ve been doing books of the year on local radio as: ‘the kind of book you’ll need a good lie down and a cry afterwards.  Probably both’. 

This Family is in that area where you’ll need soft furnishings and folding tissues.  It is also evidence of a writer growing not just in confidence and maturity, but someone who can play with a non-linear narrative and still maintain a reader’s interest.  

It is also a novel where it’s probably best to go in spoiler free.  So, let’s just give you the merest thread of the narrative.  Emma, Phoebe and Rosie return home for their mother’s wedding, the last event in the family home before it is sold. 

Now, if you’re erudite enough; you’ll probably have sussed the nod to at least one Chekhov play.  Well done, three points. But let’s be blunt here: tributes to Chekhov tend to be dry, tedious and an attempt by a writer to appear clever.  The only one who’s done it recently with any sort of grace or wit is Gary Shteyngart in Our Country Friends.  And he has a very strong track record of parodying Russian literature, tovarisch.  

But this is a different, more graceful kind of dance.  Sawyer shows a family in its true Larkinian state - and you can say that of most families.  She pulls and twists the narrative back and forward, with each character’s narrative being revealed through reveries, filtered through the last forty years of history. 

There is also the confidence to misdirect the reader and make them gasp - for example, the daughter’s Mother is not marring whom you think she is. Sawyer is also excellent on the small cruelties on family life as much as she is on what German’s call Weltschmerz. 

The Stranding was a CliFi novel with a human face, but it was as deft on the sensual  side of nature.  Here, there is sunlight, sunflowers, animals.  Most notably, as far as I’m aware the only use of pigs as the darkest of plot devices.  

And let’s return to those literary nods.  This novel includes the use of a pond as Chekhov’s gun.  I’ll say no more. 

But this is where the admiration ends and the recommendation begins. This Family is a gorgeous, slow-burning firework as much as a bittersweet study of family life.  As novels on homecomings go, it’s on the same street as The Green Road by Ann Enright. I’m probably going to spend the next eighteen months recommending this as much as did The Stranding.  

It’s published on May 11th. My thanks go to Kate Sawyer and Veronique Norton at Hodder for a proof copy.