Ungone

Eve is attempting to come to terms with her ageing mother, who has dementia and lives in a care home, and employs Erin, a total stranger, to visit the home and pretend to be her. The act has profound consequences, as all three women begin a process of doing, undoing and redoing, with complicated and ultimately necessary truths revealed about each of their lives. Ungone tells the story of a single decision-a deceptively simple thing-through which the fractured, multi-layered nature of identity and the self is both revealed and interrogated. “Ungone is unlike anything else I’ve read: it’s a clever and incisive novel of ideas taking on class, care, love and duty, and the mutability, plurality and porousness of the self. It’s formally idiosyncratic, original, unsparing, and on top of all this is pacy, funny and full of heart. I loved it.”—FRANCESCA REECE (author of Voyeur and Glass Houses) “Ungone is as original as it is thrilling and as beautiful as it is haunting. A whip-smart examination of the complexities of end-of-life care and our sense of duty to the ones we love. It is a poignant and fascinating novel, masterfully written.” —HARRY MACQUEEN (writer/director of Supernova) “Precise, complex, poignant, Ungone is a deceptively simple, brief but potent examination of strong bonds and blood ties. As one identity fades, another is made, and we find ourselves confronting our own sense of duty, responsibility and morality. Short, but deep, I found it totally absorbing and completely compelling.”—CAROL MORLEY (writer/director of Dreams of a Life and The Falling) “So astute, so shrewd… The theme—can we be someone else?—is beautifully laid out.”—DAVID HARE