Carry The One by Carol Anshaw

Carry The One

Carol Anshaw

Subtle and disturbing, this story of five people whose lives are changed by a horrific accident slowly gets under your skin. I was particularly moved by Alice, the artist whose guilt makes her endlessly return to Maude, the lover with whom she lived the accident. It’s not all doom, though: the lighter moments are tinged with wry humour.

Extract
Inside the bare rooms time stopped; they moved like sleepwalkers. Alice touched the faded ochre wallpaper, frayed at its seams and edges from the erosion of thousands of brushing fingertips, air-stirring whispers.
... Standing in the back, where Anne and her sister Margot slept, looking out of the windows onto a chestnut tree, its branches bending to a light breeze, Alice realized this must be the same tree Anne Frank saw, the sum of the natural world available to her for those two years in hiding. Suddenly Alice was sucked pneumatically through a tunnel that brought her to thoughts of children broken by instruments of fate - both by huge, deliberate killing machines and small, foolish accidents. A child stopped dead in her tracks, held back from moving into life, everything in front of her rendered perfectly smooth, free of footprints.
Parallels
  • One Moment One Morning by Sarah Rayner
  • Atonement by Ian McEwan
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Violence
Explicit sexual Content