Author(s): Patrick Gale

Fiction

It's a day in the life of a forty-something woman. She has recently been obliged to move in with her elderly mother because the latter is a committed, lifelong, naturist who no conventional care home would admit. Against the slow unfurling of their day and evening together we get glimpses of the heroine's odd childhood (the only lefty, naturist parents in a conservative community) but also learn of her bittersweet, recently revived relationship with the great love of her student days.
He, too, is a carer - obliged to move in with his gay Downs Syndrome brother since their mother's death - and he's a venereologist, so quite inured to nudity.
But what or who broke them apart twenty years ago and is it about to happen again?