Mother Made Me

It was almost midday on the second day of our trip by the time I started feeling truly murderous towards Mother.

Sixty-year-old crime writer Pat is at her wits’ end. Her mother has ruined her life with her unceasing cruelty and self-obsession, and it looks like she is never going to stop. At an event in Paris to celebrate Pat, Mother can’t resist bringing about another humiliation, and so Pat decides to take drastic action.

Soon afterwards, Graham, Pat’s devoted former lover, comes back into her life. But what is he hiding? And what of the mysterious Cynthia, who appears out of the blue claiming to be Pat’s half-sister, and looks exactly like their mother?

Inspired by the new turn her life has taken, Pat decides to write a memoir – a book about Mother, exploring the toll her cruelty took upon her. But as Pat struggles to determine the truth of her past and to separate Mother’s insistent voice in her head from her own thoughts, she is forced to reckon with a terrible question: was Mother right all along?

Deliciously dark and sharp as a knife, Mother Made Me is impossibly stylish: not a whodunit, but a who-knows-whodunit.