The Shadow of Life

Orphaned at five, Elspeth Gifford is carried north from London to Kirklands, a white house perched above heathery moorland in the Scottish borders. She has seen her mother's silent, sightless face, felt the suffocating mystery of being forgotten and left behind. But her uncle Nigel is large and kind, his presence a restoring warmth, and her aunts Rachel and Barbara weave about her, again, a child's safe universe of love. As the rooks clamor in the tall limes and seasons turn over the wood-backed slope, Elspeth grows from bewildered grief toward something like belonging. Yet the shadow of life, that early knowledge of loss and mortality, waits in her young heart to be understood. Sedgwick writes with delicate psychological precision about what it means to be a child confronting death, and what it means to be saved by love without being allowed to forget.