![]() ![]() Woven into her story is her maladjusted family, who include her father, Fergus, a poet whose career stalled shortly after he was designated “a male Sylvia Plath” her mother, Celia, an alcoholic sculptor who is charismatic yet cruel and sister Ingrid, who is both protective of and exasperated by Martha. ![]() The actor Emilia Fox reads Mason’s darkly funny novel, capturing Martha’s fury and confusion as well as her acerbic wit (the comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag are not wide of the mark). Over the next 20 years, in order to deal with the chaos in her head, she continues to seek out confined, dark spaces where she lies “like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying”. When she was 17, on the morning of her French A-level exam, “a little bomb” went off in her brain, prompting her to go home and crawl under her father’s desk. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Martha has a mental health condition. A pithy examination of marriage and mental illness shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, Sorrow and Bliss begins as its protagonist Martha splits up with her forbearing husband, Patrick, and moves back into her parents’ house. ![]()
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