Relative Stranger: A Life After Death - Softcover

One of the most moving and compelling memoirs of the year. * * Scotsman * * Vivid, true and moving. * * The Times * * In the book's opening sentence we have it all: the author's easeful lifestyle, good health, physical skill, happiness, contrasted in a blighted life ending in diseased obscurity. And the guilt arising from that contrast. * * Daily Mail * * Standing head and shoulders above the rest of the memoir genre is journalist Mary Loudon's honest, unsentimental, exquisitely written book about her schizophrenic sister. * * Eve * *

'On the twenty seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn't know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn't know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed.' Relative Stranger is the heart-rending story of Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister, whom she had not seen for the last twelve years of her life. It examines our assumptions about familial responsibility, challenging everything we believe about what it means to love, to lose, to die and, above all, to belong. It will leave no reader unaffected.