The way we danced
Sophia Hillan2016

Ruth Deacon’s academic career is in the doldrums, her marriage is in shreds, an elderly relative with dementia has become an impossible burden. Ruth needs a miracle.

It comes in the form of ‘The Memory Book’.

Edith Barratt, an elderly writer seeing out her last days in a nursing home, has decided to entrust a lifetime of writings to Ruth, to publish after her death. And, by also giving her the ‘Memory Book’, she breaks a lifetime of silence about a youthful love that has dominated her entire life.

Ruth eagerly seizes on this material – it could rescue her career. When she discovers that Edith’s one-time love was an idealistic soldier of the Third Reich, she is even more encouraged. But then she finds herself faced with a challenge: that of exploring the gap between memory and desire, reality and illusion. Did Edith’s young German truly love her? And what is the significance of a half-remembered melody sung by Fred Astaire?

Starting in Belfast, moving through pre-war Berlin and returning to Ireland’s tentative and fragile peace of 1995, Sophia Hillan’s new novel traces a path to those things that cannot, in the end, be taken away.

Titre original : The Way We Danced (2016)