Blue-Grey Island

How do you enter a world that is stripped of language? This is Mannie s dilemma as she enters Ward B on a hot July s day, to visit her husband Ralph. Ralph, an eminent cosmologist, and talented artist, is in the later stages of dementia. The story reflects back to the beginnings of Ralph s illness and gradually draws the reader into his confused inner world. This world is fleshed out by fragmented memories of his childhood, his troubled relationship with his father, and a life-long quest to bring science and spirituality into harmony. Blue-Grey Island has been described as delicately written, full of energy and ideas. The novel explores the theme of what constitutes personal identity and offers a way into understanding dementia. It is primarily a story about human relationships - told through the history of Ralph s family, which has been shrouded in mystery. It is also a novel of ideas that raises questions concerning the conflict between faith and rational knowledge, the role of the artistic imagination in the survival of a troubled mind, and how we might find a way to communicate with another s confusion. The past impacts on the present, and the presence of memory, in all of its subtle and more obvious forms, is woven within a tapestry of events that begin in Paris 1886, and lead up to the present day. As such, this is both an historical novel and a story particularly resonant of our time.