Sarah is living in the strange white space of grief. It is three months since her only child, 22-year-old Cully, died in an avalanche, and she is learning how to live again: returning to work, trying to find a way of continuing. While her loss occasionally floods her, for the most part she keeps it boxed up. She has to, if she is to move forwards. Kaui Hart Hemmings is excellent at conveying the sense of social unease that surrounds Sarah – the awkwardness she generates in others and in herself, the odd comments that escape her lips, the misfiring jokes that no one else understands.
Sarah is not alone in her grief; she’s supported by her gruff but kind father and her spectacularly tactless friend Suzanne, who is in the middle of a painful divorce. She’s also starting to discover that she didn’t know her son as well as she thought and just as she is starting to find her way up and out of the fog of her loss, a young woman named Kit crashes into her life, carrying a secret with her. Kit was briefly Cully’s girlfriend and she is also trying to find a way to mourn the man she was intimate with but didn’t really know for all that long.
As with Hemmings’s previous novel, The Descendants, the emotionally knotty story plays out in a place of beauty and transience: Breckenridge, an affluent mountain town in Colorado, the population of which swells dramatically each year when the skiing season begins. People visit and have their fun only to drift away again.
This is a novel that creeps up on you, its frequent bursts of humour masking a gentle yet astute examination of the various ways in which people deal with bereavement and the bereaved.
The Possibilities is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £14.44
