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Title: Grace and Mary
Author: Melvyn Bragg
Narrator: Gordon Griffin, Sandra Duncan
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
Language: English
Release date: 05-09-13
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
A profoundly moving story spanning three generations. Could he not put together a memory for her? Perhaps he could become her memory. To build it from fragments, or make it up. And most of all bring back Grace. Her own mother.
John visits his ageing mother, Mary, in her nursing home by the sea, and mourns the slow fading of her mind. Hoping to shore up her receding memory, he prompts her with songs, photographs, and questions from their shared past, taking her back to the 1940s, when she was a young woman and he a child in a small Cumbrian town. But as he rekindles her memories, it is her own mother she longs for - and John finds himself delving further back, into the secrets and silences of Mary's fractured childhood, and the unsung sorrows of her thwarted yet spirited mother, Grace.
In an effort to console his mother before she slips away, John sets out to re-imagine Grace's life, to honour the memory of a grandmother he barely knew.
Reaching from the late 19th century to the present, John's loving recreation of forgotten family history and unspoken maternal grief becomes a moving elegy for the long, hidden chain of love, loss, and self-sacrifice that forms each and every generation.
Critic Reviews:
"Quite simply one of the best writers we have" (Sunday Telegraph)
Members Reviews:
A tender story that's both sad and uplifting
A son visiting his aging mother, Mary, is saddened by her advancing dementia but strives to encourage her to remember her past and her mother, Grace. The listener is taken back and forth in the family's history with revelations of prejudice, disappointments and courage. The book exposes attitudes in society in the first half of the 20th Century, particularly towards women. I felt immersed in the era that the book spans and the author's familiarity with his birthplace in Cumbria gave a great sense of where the story is set.
The two narrators give voices to the characters that bring them to life.
Wonderful heartwarming story
I thoroughly enjoyed this. It is obviouslly based on personal experience which gives it more intensity. The book is basically the story of a man and his elderly mother, who is suffering from dementia and in a care home. He encourages her to talk about the past where the memories are still intact, and so we learn about Mary's past and that of her mother Grace.
The tale touches on the issues of illegitimacy and how it was viewed in small-town Cumbria in the early 20th century; also that of ageing parents and how we cope with and react to the changes in them.
The descriptions of Carlisle, Wigton and Silloth both present and past were evocative (I live in Carlisle and so know most of the places described). I particularly liked though the way the author writes about his conflicting feelings concerning his mother (through the character of John); the many emotions of anger, impatience, guilt, tenderness and love that are involved in coping with an ageing relative and coming to terms with the loss even before they are gone.
This was beautifully and sensitively narrated.
A bit of a struggle
I'm afraid I did struggle with this book. I felt that all too often the characterisation was sacrificed on the alter of erudition. I wanted to know more about the people, their feelings and emotions and motivation, rather than the learned facts.
