A short coming-of-age story about love and leaving home as experienced by several generations of a working class family. On Jess’s last evening at home, her grandparents and parents tells stories about growing up in the 30s and 50s respectively, and then Jess reflects on her own experiences.

There are all sorts of interesting details in here: the grandparents who married against their parents wishes; the granny who was a “buffer girl”; her father’s feelings about the prospect of National Service; the way the family coped with Jess’s older brother’s disability and then with his death. I liked the way telling these stories side-by-side shows how times changes and also how people take different paths to adulthood, but I thought the book was a bit disjointed and wished it had focused more on some stories and less on others. Some of the prose is lovely, and as a whole this book is… oddly melancholy and memorable.

The sky was rushing to early sunset. The clouds were tinged with apricot. I could see our house from here, and the spread of Sheffield away from it, with street lights already pricking out the way the roads went. I was on the top of the Bole Hills, the windiest green in the world, Grandpa told me. There was a quarry here once. Some people say it’s really “bone hills” because it was built on an old tip, and when I think I’m standing on the bottles and bones and crumbling waste of long-dead families I feel dizzy, as if this tiny moment of the present and all the moments of my future are slipping away fast from me. ( )