The House We Grew Up In

“Sometimes when she looked at her little sister she felt overcome with love. Her worst enemy and her best friend.”

Megan and Bethan are close as children, but as they grow up, they take different paths. Megan leaves her sister to look after their mother while she moves to London. Their relationship becomes more strained when Bethan has an affair with Megan’s partner, Bill. However, their bond does not break, and they are reunited in the end.

“Look at that sky, just look at it. The blueness of it. Makes me want to snatch out handfuls of it and put it in my pockets.”

This shows Lorelei’s love of nature but also her disconnection from reality. She lives in a fantasy world that’s about capturing the present moment and trying to hold on to it. Her husband looks at her with “love and worry,” suggesting there is an underlying problem he can’t mention.

“They lived in a honey-coloured house that sat hard up against the pavement of a picture-postcard Cotswolds village and stretched out beyond into three-quarters of an acre of rambling half-kempt gardens.”

The idyllic surroundings are an important feature of the book. This is a place that many people would want to live, but behind the façade, there are secrets and tragedies. The house is disfigured by Lorelei’s hoarding syndrome.