Patricia Margaret Drake was not a wanted child. Born in 1943 in the north-east of England, she was the product of a fleeting wartime encounter – and her unplanned arrival marked the end of freedom for her mother, Moyra. A young, working class woman barely out of childhood herself, Moyra was entirely unprepared for the social prejudices and financial pressures of single parenthood. Throughout Pat's early years she was distracted, resentful, often absent, eventually abandoning her daughter to pursue a new husband. Meanwhile Pat's father was out of the picture and untraceable: the man who wasn't there.
Many decades later, Dame Pat Barker has defied the odds to become a bestselling and widely beloved author, a Booker Prize winner, a national treasure. Her own grown-up daughter, Anna, has followed in her footsteps as a writer. And in all her years as a storyteller, Pat has never shared the story of her own life with anyone - not even Anna.
Now at last, mother and daughter unravel that thread together, teasing out many strands of ambivalent female inheritance: of women’s lives shaped and constrained by circumstance and social condition, but also of those who break the generational cycle of trauma, through incredible strength of will and self-sacrifice. Through this remarkable family memoir, they reveal a much bigger story of class and sex in twentieth century Britain.
