A Keeper

A Keeper by Graham Norton

     Elizabeth Keane returns to her birth home in Buncarragh, Ireland, to disperse her mother’s estate and settle the selling of the house. She wants nothing and if she could help it she wouldn’t want the memories, either. It was always just Elizabeth and her mother all of her life, just the two of them. All questions about her father went unanswered other than to say he died very young and was a lovely man.

      The only part of her mother’s story Elizabeth knows is the part everyone knows, that Patricia cared for her sick mother till the end, then miraculously had a gentleman friend, a rushed wedding and a baby no one could explain. In Ireland that was fodder for the rumor factories who lived for such stories.

      Now as she is going through her mother’s things Elizabeth finds a box with letters, a baby bootie, a photo and a name and after wondering her whole life who would not investigate? She knows where to start when, upon opening the mail that had piled up she finds a letter from her mother’s solicitor.

      Told in alternating times, now and forty years before, we learn of Elizabeth’s life gone wrong, and her mother, Patricia’s story. Elizabeth is in Ireland, divorced with a teenaged son who isn’t where he is supposed to be at the moment and not liking what she hears from her ex. Patricia, forty years earlier, ran toward a future she thought she would surely miss if she didn’t take this chance.

      I can’t say too much here, I don’t believe in spoiler alerts and really don’t appreciate them when I’m interested in a book. All I’ll say is there is an “ah ha!” moment where the author proves there is nothing new under the sun.

     Graham Norton is a storyteller for sure.