"Her mother, perhaps, floated between past, present and future, and wound them together in a skein." Meanwhile, she holds random conversations with a voice in her head purporting to be her dead mother. Are stars just balls of dead dust or, worse, empty celebrities, and if they are, what can we wish on or pray to? She knows what she writes is shallow but, as she puts it, the shallows are safer than the depths: there's survival in the shallows.
Kate goes back and forth to Norfolk in her "search for pattern and structure", writes humiliating soundbite pieces for the magazine she works for, and considers stars. Will it be Julian, now married to the dastardly Jessica? Or hunky, stubbly builder-cum-architect Adam, also a single parent (phew!)? Her mother is long dead - in a mysterious crash on that blind bend - accident or suicide? Grown-up Kate, casualty of her own broken marriage, living in Crouch End with son Sam, is looking for love. But on page 14 the novel abandons its auspicious start for a benumbed and standard plot, a year in the life of Kate, now in her mid-30s and a journalist. While they split up elsewhere, eight-year-old Kate is abandoned by her parents at a family house in Norfolk with her aunt, her physicist uncle, many clocks that strike 13 and all her many fascinating cousins, including Julian. It begins on a "blind curve" with a storybook house at the end of it, a child's-eye view steeped in an English Edwardian literary air reminiscent of Rosamond Lehmann and PL Travers, tightly written and promisingly observed - "the drawing room was not for drawing". Picardie's debut novel, Wish I May, is also about the hearing and the not-hearing of voices.
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