Necessary madness

After only eight years of marriage Gloria Burgess's beloved husband Bill, a painter, succumbs to leukaemia, leaving Gloria with a son to raise alone in an adopted England. The madness of grief is a constant, overwhelming temptation she must withstand, for her child's sake if not her own.

To accomplish this Gloria looks back over her childhood in America and the lessons she can learn from the past.

Between her father's clinging, drowning despair and her mother's emotional abandonment there is a balance that she struggles to find. And meanwhile life goes inexorably on, in spite of Gloria's anguish. There must be ways to reinvent herself, to find happiness again, and to bring peace back to the tumult of her world.

Necessary madness is an extraordinary novel about the many shades of family love and loss. Beautifully written and brilliantly perceptive, it is a heartwrenching love story and a poignant exploration of the anger and despair of life after death. Jenn Crowell's stunning first novel marks the arrival of an astonishing talent.