My mother says

After being dumped by her girlfriend, the narrator is forced to move back into the rectory of her father, a minister and Pink Floyd fan. As she tries in hilariously desperate ways to get her ex back, she is inundated with advice: from her assertive mother, who often utters dubious wisdom; from her childhood friend and spin doctor Mulle; and from the patient family doctor, who tells her about the place in the brain that carries memory – it’s called the hippocampus, or ‘seahorse’. It leads the narrator’s thoughts to the little seahorse that lives inside all of us and stores our memories.

But gradually the narrator allows herself to grieve, to indulge her waywardness, and to be loud and drunk, until the lights at the end of the tunnel come back on and a new love emerges.

My Mother Says is a novel full of energy and elegance, a story about talking past each other, about being alone due to misunderstandings, about farewells and past love.