Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Clare Morrall

“When is the right time to tell someone they’re not who they think they are?” Caught in an over-vivid world as a result of synaesthesia (a condition in which emotions are seen as colours), Kitty Wellington is tipped off-centre by the loss of a child. And as children all around become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she’s made shockingly aware of the real reasons for her pervasive sense of her own “non-existence.”

What mystery at the heart of Kitty’s family makes her four older brothers so vague about her mother’s life? And why does her artist father splash paint on canvas rather than answer his daughter’s questions? On the edges of her dreams, Kitty glimpses the kaleidoscope hippie van that took her sister Dinah away and wonders how this event may link to the dim corridors of her own childhood, a childhood in which she had no tangible sense of her mother.

This compelling novel is threaded through with a dark humour and resonates with universal truths as it tells of identity struggles in a large family, the sadness of lost children, the approach of breakdown and desperation – and the optimism of an eccentric, loving marriage. Skilful, unsentimental, fresh, and original, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a sparkling debut by a writer of exceptional talent.