Astonishing Splashes of Colour [Paperback]

Like Booker-winner Monica Ali, British newcomer and Booker finalist Morrall creates an alienated yet immensely appealing heroine. But unlike Ali's protagonist, Kitty Wellington is at home in Britain's culture; it's her spectacularly dysfunctional family and a personal tragedy that bring her grief. Dangerously unstable after a miscarriage and her resulting inability to conceive again, Kitty sees other people and her environment in auras of color. A device brilliantly effective at times, this serves to establish Kitty's febrile, fantastical imagination. For three years, Kitty has lived in a flat next door to her loving, ineffectual husband, whose own problems (a limp; an obsession with order; a fear of unfamiliar places) render him similarly incapable of dealing with the world. But Morrall gradually reveals the real cause of Kitty's anguish: her lack of identity. Brought up helter-skelter by her irascible, eccentric artist father and four older brothers, Kitty has no memory of her mother, who died when she was three. Even in her most depressed moments, however, Kitty has wit and intelligence, even as her childlike impulsiveness and failure to foresee the consequences of her acts lead her to initiate a double kidnapping. Morrall artfully reveals the true story of Kitty's family in a suspenseful plot that unfolds like layers of an onion, meanwhile providing a convincing portrait of a woman striving for emotional survival.
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Taking its title from a description of Neverland in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Morrall has created an ethereal novel of loss and redemption that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. While Kitty grew up with four much older brothers and an eccentric father, cared for by all five, she never stops asking questions about the mother she can't remember. Each brother answers differently and her father avoids the subject. When she miscarries her own child and cannot have another, her search for her mother intensifies, becoming confused with a search to replace her lost child. As the story is told through Kitty's engagingly intimate voice, the reader is compelled to follow her wanderings, searches, and flights. Characters are brilliantly drawn, the pacing is perfect, and the tone is never maudlin. A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, this is a novel to be savored. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“A heartbreaking and accomplished debut.”
–The Bookseller (starred review)

“Absorbing and sure-footed.…. Extremely well written and compulsively readable.… Morrall has written a genuinely solid and satisfying work of fiction, skilfully plotted and fielding a cast of fully realised and individualised characters. More please.”
–Sunday Times (U.K.)

“An extremely good first novel: deceptively simple, subtly observed, with a plot that drags you forward like a strong current.”
–Daily Mail (U.K.)

“A moving novel about loss, and particularly lost children.”
–The Guardian (U.K.)

“We are drawn by Kitty into her unique world as she strives for a sense of self, of belonging.… I defy anyone to read this book slowly. Or to read it once and then just forget it.”
–newBOOKS.mag

“An intense portrait of a woman who cannot remember her own mother and will never be a mother herself.… A real page-turner.”
–Big Issue (U.K.)

“An extraordinary, gripping novel written with no sentimentality. A wonderful piece of writing – it is astonishing that she has never been published before.”
–Professor John Carey, Chair of the Man Booker Prize

“When is the right time to tell someone they’re not who they think they are?” Caught in an over-vivid world as a result of synaesthesia (a condition in which emotions are seen as colours), Kitty Wellington is tipped off-centre by the loss of a child. And as children all around become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she’s made shockingly aware of the real reasons for her pervasive sense of her own “non-existence.”

What mystery at the heart of Kitty’s family makes her four older brothers so vague about her mother’s life? And why does her artist father splash paint on canvas rather than answer his daughter’s questions? On the edges of her dreams, Kitty glimpses the kaleidoscope hippie van that took her sister Dinah away and wonders how this event may link to the dim corridors of her own childhood, a childhood in which she had no tangible sense of her mother.

This compelling novel is threaded through with a dark humour and resonates with universal truths as it tells of identity struggles in a large family, the sadness of lost children, the approach of breakdown and desperation – and the optimism of an eccentric, loving marriage. Skilful, unsentimental, fresh, and original, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a sparkling debut by a writer of exceptional talent.

Margaret Forster said of this book: ‘Fresh, frightening and raw. There’s nothing the least depressing about this nevertheless sad story, certainly nothing remotely sentimental.’

“A heartbreaking and accomplished debut.”
–The Bookseller (starred review)

“Absorbing and sure-footed.…. Extremely well written and compulsively readable.… Morrall has written a genuinely solid and satisfying work of fiction, skilfully plotted and fielding a cast of fully realised and individualised characters. More please.”
–Sunday Times (U.K.)

“An extremely good first novel: deceptively simple, subtly observed, with a plot that drags you forward like a strong current.”
–Daily Mail (U.K.)

“A moving novel about loss, and particularly lost children.”
–The Guardian (U.K.)

“We are drawn by Kitty into her unique world as she strives for a sense of self, of belonging.… I defy anyone to read this book slowly. Or to read it once and then just forget it.”
–newBOOKS.mag

“An intense portrait of a woman who cannot remember her own mother and will never be a mother herself.… A real page-turner.”
–Big Issue (U.K.)

“An extraordinary, gripping novel written with no sentimentality. A wonderful piece of writing – it is astonishing that she has never been published before.”
–Professor John Carey, Chair of the Man Booker Prize

Astonishing Splashes of Colour is Clare Morrall’s first published novel. Born in 1952, Morrall grew up in Exmouth, Devon. She has two adult daughters and lives in Birmingham, England, where she works as a music teacher. This debut novel has gained attention around the world.