IN THE BLOOD

I ve never read a book like it It s as if they tore their own hearts out and asked the other to hold it for them while they wrote Phoebe Waller Bridge A terrific read Amy Liptrot author of The Outrun Remarkable As a stark insight into the disease In the Blood makes a mark The Sunday Times Culture Alcohol flows across families like water over a landscape Sometimes it moves in torrents sometimes in floods sometimes in trickles It always shapes the ground it covers in unmistakable ways In the Blood is a memoir in two voices those of a mother and daughter both in the grip of the disease that has ravaged generations of women in their family Julia aged sixty five and Arabella thirty eight ended up in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous just nine months apart In some ways it s a predictable story two addicts drank and destroyed and ransacked until they could drink no more In others it is entirely unlike any account of motherhood or addiction that has ever been told This is not a recovery memoir but rather an unflinching family drama spanning generations whilst looking pain and shame directly in the eye Confronting the difficulty of writing faithfully about those we love and the ways in which memory blurs the boundaries of fact this is the story