The scrapbook - Carly Holmes

When I first saw you, I had the sun in my eyes. You shone around the edges, a fireball of a man. In the moments it took me to focus on your centre, Id absorbed you completely.

I re-made myself in tune to your blinks, your frowns, your glances away from me and then back. I read your needs as they soared across your face, and I carved myself anew again and again

Ferns choices in life and in love are an echo of her mothers, as Iris are an echo of her own mothers. Three women, three generations: one dark secret.

Iris keeps a scrapbook of Lawrence, the lover who went missing years earlier. Ferns father. She defines herself by his loss and soothes herself with gin and the fairytale of this one perfect relationship... Fern, once a strange and difficult child who believed that her dead grandmothers soul lived inside her stomach, reluctantly returns home to the island to take care of Iris. She is tasked with finding Lawrence and in the process she has to confront her own past and memories... Ivy, Iris mother, had her own cache of secrets; spells she took to the grave. Spells that Fern unearths.

The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. Its about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And its about absence and the power that a void can exert over a persons life.