Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

• Gateshead Libraries & Arts,England

Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two days old. Her life begins without history, in the dark outdoors. Who is she, where has she come from, and what can she become? Thirty years later, married to Adam, she gives birth to Ruby, and to a new life for herself. But when sudden tragedy changes the course of that life forever, and all the lives that touch hers, Rebecca is out in the world again, searching…

Illuminated by both sorrow and vivid joy, Mourning Ruby is ultimately about the transcendent power of storytelling itself.

Helen Dunmore is the author of seven previous novels including Zennor In Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize, A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize, Your Blue-eyed Boy, and The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer. She lives in Bristol, England.