Böcker av Catherine Simpson

When I had a Little Sister by Catherine Simpson is a searingly honest and heartbreaking account of growing up in a farming family, and of Catherine's search for understanding into what led her younger sister to kill herself at 46. It's a story of sisters and sacrifice, grief and reclamation, and of the need to speak the unspeakable.

Alice's life is dictated by her autistic son, Sam, who refuses to leave their remote Lancashire farm. Her only time 'off' is two hours in Lancaster on a Tuesday afternoon - and even that doesn't always pan out to be the break she needs. Husband Duncan brings Larry, a rootless wanderer, to the farm to embark on a money making scheme they've dreamed up. Alice is hostile but Larry beguiles Sam with tales of travel in the outside world and, soon, Alice begins to fall for him, too. By turns blackly comic, heart-breaking and heart-warming, Truestory looks at what happens when sacrifice slithers towards martyrdom. By turns happy and sad, ultimately it is a tale of hope.