Fiction

Can you bond with someone who’s on borrowed time? Victor’s mum Jayne is stuck between life and death in a London hospital. Visiting from the Isle of Wight, Victor sofa-surfs at his daughter’s flat, accidentally begins an affair with an attractive doctor and battles his dyslexia to record Jayne’s memoirs. She’s been a top political journalist; he’s a sometime actor and pantomime dame, but she’s mistaking him for his favoured elder brother William, a Tory MP. To add to the confusion, Jayne’s convinced she’s being visited at night by former Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

Victor and Jayne have a brittle relationship. After many false dawns, he hopes they may bond at last over her rambling and disjointed tales. As the days of her illness blur into weeks, Victor pieces together family secrets that throw new light on his own bittersweet story. At the heart of it all is a feature article, Sons of Great Men, that Jayne wrote in the 1960s to gain a foothold in the male-dominated newsroom of a Fleet Street paper.

Victor’s summer reckoning – with family, mortality, work, love and belonging – may strike a chord with those who know how it feels to reach one of life’s crossroads.

Special features: book group discussion prompts and a bonus short story.