She, You, I
Sally Keeble
Publication date: January 11th 2023
Genres: Adult, Contemporary
An emotional page-turner of a story about a family torn apart by the legacy of war that asks the question: what happens to the hurt we can’t forget?
When Skye Stanhope returns to her grandmother’s childhood home, she’s searching for the roots of her life story. Why her tough-minded granny ran away to war. And why her brilliant mother died.Behind the women’s successes, lies deep trauma. As Skye strips away the layers of secrecy, she confronts their inner torments: forces that bound the women together, but also tore them apart. It’s a journey from a poverty-stricken tenement block to an airbase in wartime Suffolk, through boom-time London to a coffee cart beside the sea.
Woven into the women’s lives is Tseng Hsiao Ling, a feisty, enigmatic seamstress whose fortunes become inextricably linked with theirs.
It’s a sweeping tale of love, war and family secrets over three generations.
Through each woman’s story, “She, You, I” holds up a mirror to the complexity of family relationships: mothers, sisters, daughters, and the unexpected twists in Skye’s search for closure.
“I”
Skye’s Story
Our pitch is in a layby down a bank beside a river, near a south coast town. Morning sunlight steals across the water into the clearing where we park our SUV. Kit Ying unhitches the trailer. The grass is still bouncy with dawn dew. Birds sing into emptiness. The air here has a purity that makes you think that because you can see and hear and smell things more clearly, you can understand them better too. Kit Ying says it’s our ground zero. But that doesn’t work, I tell him. That would be an ending. Not an ending, a nothingness, he says. A place to start again.
‘Coffee, tea, tray-bakes,’ I chalk onto the display board we put out on the roadside. I draw floaty stars and underneath Kit Ying writes, ‘Special—pork buns’ and draws some fancy Chinese characters.
“What does that say?”
“That they’re authentic.”
It was hard explaining to Aunt Julia about the coffee cart.
Author Bio:
Sally writes novels about the things she’s passionate about—the triumphs and tragedies of people’s lives, their families and life stories.
It’s what originally took her into journalism and then politics, in the UK and beyond. She spent her early years in the USA, Switzerland and Australia, returning to the UK after working as a journalist in South Africa. After serving as an MP, she worked in international development and travelled widely, especially in Africa and South Asia.
“She, You, I” is her first novel. She’s written nonfiction previously. Sally splits her time between Northampton and Bawdsey, a village in coastal Suffolk.
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