Costa-shortlisted Bray’s second book is about Darren, a bus driver and single dad, and Clover, his 12-year-old daughter. Clover’s mother, Becky, was killed by a car when Clover was six weeks old. Set in Merseyside, during a long, hot summer, Clover is given her own latchkey and trusted to take care of herself for the first time. The second bedroom in her home, crammed with the dead mother’s belongings that Darren can’t bring himself to throw out, pulses with possibilities for Clover. After a school trip to Liverpool’s Maritime Museum, Clover starts to curate a surprise exhibition of her mother’s possessions by secretly turning the bedroom into a museum. The museum’s exhibits range from a yellow plastic comb with hairs still tangled in it to a black t-shirt with the words “I’m flying without wings.” Clover attaches an imagined story to each object, trying to uncover her dead parent. Ultimately Darren realises that you can’t reconstruct somebody using their belongings and that heartache never really goes away: “That’s no bad thing – it’s only the other side of love, after all.” Bray is funny, occasionally twee, but always honest.
