Restitution

June 1939, a baby is born. October 1977, a middle-aged man takes his own life. What strand joins these separate lives. The quest for a connection will take Betony Falk, a young Englishwoman, on a strange and disturbing journey through her family’s past – and Europe's.

Outside the deserted church of a picture-postcard English village, wild flowers nod silently by the graves of the Falk family. but a churchyard of ancestors may mean less than it seems. Betony Falk finds she has roots more tangled than she could ever have imagined.

A correct English matron, a dead country nanny, an elderly German ex-officer, a young black dancer and his Berlin love. all, it seems, hold a piece of Betony’s past, and all have their voices in a story that grows more remarkable, more disturbing in the telling. Finally, painfully, the pieces will be put together. But discovery of her true identity only increases Betony’s confusion about who she really is.

In Restitution Maureen Duffy has written her most important work to date, a profound and powerful novel of identity, history and guilt.