BOOK
The Still Point, by Amy Sackville
Portobello Books
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Julia picks over the diaries of her illustrious ancestor while examining the state of her marriage.
REVIEW
This book marks the debut of author Amy Sackville and she handles her task with confidence and a warmly engaging brand of poetical insight.
Her story features two distinct panoramas, yet there are links between them that the author examines with tender forensics.
Julia is intent on sorting out the mad tangle of inherited belongings in her old family house that once belonged to an illustrious ancestor.
A century before, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley set out to reach the North Pole... but he vanished without a trace, leaving his young wife to wait for decades for news, her fitful devotion chilling as the years of emptiness accrued.
As Julia reads the diaries that paint a picture of a promising but unfulfilled partnership, she has cause to reflect on her own marriage to Simon, measuring their solid but uneventful romance against the grand glory of a tragic passion.
But as the day passes, Julia begins to see cracks in the picture of Emily and Edward's romance - the story she had treasured since childhood - while her own relationship faces its own abrupt crisis.
The author meditates richly on the forms and measures of distance that can form between two people.
