The Mending Room

Dublin, January 1943. Annie moves through her days with quiet purpose: tending the fires, cycling to her allotment, reading letters at the writing desk where she keeps a bundle tied with ribbon. The city is under the shadow of the Emergency, but in Annie's house the greatest weight is private. Her son Alec left for Burma six years ago to work on a tea plantation, and the world he travelled to has since been consumed by war. As Annie waits for news, the novel opens outward through letters: from Alec on the Irrawaddy and in the orchid forests of the Shan States, and from his cousin Rose, a painter and naturalist, whose own account reveals the full story.