Indigo mimics and holds all that is in my eye: blackness and light, birth and death, the passages between them. Indigo is not really a colour, it is not a cloth I realized. It is only the tangible intangible. The attempt to capture beauty, to hold the elusive, the fine layer of skin between the two. Death is a praising of life; death teaches us how to live. Colour, cloth is simply the praise song. And so I embraced blackness as my route to blue.

If that quotation from early in this book appeals to you, you will enjoy Catherine McKinley’s story – a story in which fact is often obscured by feeling. I confess to having had a hard time getting through it, made harder by the writer’s slapdash approach to syntax, which