Cambridge Edition June 2023 - Newsletter

CULTURE CLUB

THIS COULD BE US

BY CLAIRE MCGOWAN It is 2002, and Kate’s 30th birthday. On paper, she has it all: a beautiful house, handsome husband, a two-year-old son and a second baby due in a month. She’s throwing a birthday party and has invited friends and colleagues to join her at home. Her friend Olivia arrives early to assist with setting up, incredibly helpful as she always is. As expected, the party is a great success: guests mingle and laugh, music plays, food and drink is enjoyed – until Kate falls to the floor and her labour begins, a month early. A terrifying whirl follows as Kate is rushed to hospital, resulting in an emergency caesarean. She slowly wakes, husband Andrew at her side, and a consultant is uttering the life- changing sentence: “I’m sorry to tell you I have some bad news.” Kate and Andrew’s daughter Kirsty has been born with a chromosomal disorder so rare that it doesn’t even have a name. She will never walk, talk or hold herself up. The whole family’s life changes forever in a heartbeat. The mutated gene has come from Kate’s side: at the consultant’s mention of miscarriage in the family history, she recalls long-forgotten memories of her mother being mysteriously ill, crying and not coming home for months. Kate and Andrew’s two-year- old son Adam has a 50% chance of carrying the gene, though he can’t be tested until he can give consent. After a heartbreaking, exhausting year of trying to keep her daughter’s small, red body alive, Kate asks Olivia for help, and she becomes another member of the household. The book then skips through time: Kate is now living in a glamorous LA home with her film producer husband Conor, and arrives home to challenge him. She has learnt that back in the UK, her ex-husband Andrew has not only written a smash-hit book about the experience of parenting Kirsty – but Kate’s new husband wants to option it and

make a film with the story. As different chapters reveal more of the family’s tragic past and re-entwined present, we discover Olivia seems to now be with Andrew, and Kate walked out on her family just five years after Kirsty’s birth. Is Andrew’s book and film about to throw Kate to the wolves, just as she’s rebuilt her life? Or would that be a deserved fate for the woman who abandoned her husband, son and severely disabled daughter? Or perhaps, is it all a lot more complex? The book begins with a heartfelt author’s note, explaining McGowan’s intention. Her brother was born with a similarly unknown disorder. She says writing the book was meant to “shine a light on families like mine, which struggle on with so little support, broken by love and pain.” A challenging, unforgettable novel, which leaves you wondering at the harsh lottery of life and how people bear to carry such burdens – yet find tiny scraps of purest joy, even in short supply.

BY RACHELLE ATALLA Thirsty Animals

Anyone who spent last summer in the UK and experienced the record-breaking heatwave will no doubt be unsettled by this disturbingly believable work of speculative fiction. Set in Scotland after a dry winter, the rain has stopped and water has dried up. Daily life continues, grimly recognisable, subtly reminiscent of restrictions during the pandemic. You get the sense of the wider issues taking place in the background, behind regular day-to-day challenges of being a young person in the world. The book opens as twenty-one-year-old Aida arrives at her job at the service station just across the border with England. While she flirts with shift partner Aaron, news on the TV is covering the swift building of desalination plants to deal with the country-wide water shortage. Then it wheels out an opposing opinion, a mortgage-free man in his mid-sixties who took videos of water running from his own taps to prove there weren’t any shortages. The two discuss rumours that the border between England and Scotland is about to close, meaning they’d probably lose their jobs. Customers arrive and Aida rings up their order: “I scanned the crisps through first, £1.19. But it took me a moment to remove the security tag from the bottle of water. Eventually, after I’d fought with the tag, the item rang through at £14.99.” The unsettling plausibility continues. In the service station toilets, the taps have been disconnected to stop people filling bottles with water. Out in the fields nothing is growing: “a country with a population of sixty-odd million had essentially run dry.” After her shift, Aida returns to her parents’ farm; her mum is wrestling with keeping livestock alive in lambing season and their well has not yet run dry, but they know it’s a possibility. And then some strangers arrive on the farm... Brilliantly descriptive and alarmingly plausible, this is not a fun summer read, but it will make you grateful there’s still water coming from your tap.

The rain has stopped, water has dried up

26 JUNE 2023 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK

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