The book:
Long-listed for this years’ Man Booker Prize, Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family is a page-turner of extremely high literary merit.
A book of dark secrets, it opens with a blaze. On the morning of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s house goes up in flames, destroying her entire family - her present, her past and her future.
Fleeing from the carnage, stricken and alone, June finds herself in a motel room by the ocean, hundreds of miles from her Connecticut home, held captive by memories and the mistakes she has made with her only child, Lolly, and her partner, Luke. In the turbulence of grief and gossip left in June’s wake we slowly make sense of the unimaginable.
The novel is a gathering of voices, and each testimony has a new revelation about what led to the catastrophe; everyone touched by the tragedy finds themselves caught in the undertow, as their secret histories finally come to light. Did You Ever Have a Family is an elegant, unforgettable story.
What the Guardian thought:
Did You Ever Have a Family opens on a summer morning, the morning of June Reid’s daughter’s wedding. Except that in the early hours a gas leak at June’s house has caused an explosion. The fire that follows kills her whole family, not only her daughter Lolly and William, Lolly’s fiance, but also her boyfriend, Luke, and her ex-husband Adam. Only June survives. In a single stroke she has lost everyone she loves. The loss, as she herself numbly acknowledges, is obscene. It is left to a gossiping neighbour in a local coffee shop to put the question June herself cannot begin to ask, let alone answer: “How do you recover from that? How would you even begin?”
It is a premise so harrowing that a reader might themselves question the wisdom of beginning the novel. But from the ashes of the fatal blaze Clegg has drawn a tale of prodigious tenderness and lyricism. As June flees her small Connecticut town, driving the breadth of the country in a desperate attempt to outpace her grief, her family’s story is taken up by an interwoven chorus of voices, all of them involved in one way or another with those who have died.
But for them all the senseless events of that terrible night shine a light into the complexities and compromises of their own lives, the ordinary joys and heartbreaks of family and friendships, the small things that we fail to do and the precious gifts that we so quickly come to take for granted.
From his small-town milieu, Clegg has conjured a novel that reveals the depths of the human heart. Himself a recovering addict and the author of two acclaimed memoirs about addiction, he understands better than most the emotional damage we wreak on one another, the crushing burden we are condemned to carry when we make mistakes with catastrophic consequences that can never be undone.
This is a wonderful and deeply moving novel, which compels us to look directly into the dark night of our deepest fears and then quietly, step by tiny step, guides us towards the first pink smudges of the dawn.
Clare Clark - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
- A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
- The Past by Tessa Hadley
- Lila by Marilynne Robinson
To order a Shelf Improvement subscription, please ring our Shelf Improvement Order Hotline on 0330 333 6868. We are waiting your call to spruce up old bookshelves.
