The Keepsake - Tapa blanda

Through a shifting and interwoven narrative, Kirsty Gunn explores the dark world of a young girl who has grown up with a mother dependent on storytelling and the oblivion of addiction to cope with the memory of her lost love, the girl's father. Raised on these deceptive tales of happiness, the younger woman is drawn into and begins to relive the real story of pain, abandonment, and the tyranny of desire. Her shocking affair with an older man seems to repeat the pattern set by her mother. The tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to be unraveled by the younger woman - until finally she can come to tell a story that is her own.

Kirsty Gunn's two novels -- Rain and The Keepsake -- have established her as an important new voice in literary fiction. Written in her unmistakable and melodic prose, The Keepsake is a haunting and unforgettable novel about a lifetime of secrets that bind the relationship between a mother and her daughter.

In hypnotic and mesmerizing language, Gunn explores the dark world of a young girl who has grown up with a mother dependent on storytelling and the oblivion of addiction -- her only way of coping with the memory of her lost love, the girl's father. Raised on deceptive tales of happiness, the younger woman is drawn into and begins to relive the real story of pain, abandonment, and the tyranny of desire. As her life spirals out of control, the tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to be unraveled -- until finally she can come to tell a story that is her own. Proof of Kirsty Gunn's powerful gift, this luminous and disturbing novel reveals the terrible intimacy of family love and the redemptive power of storytelling.