Ingrid

Ingrid

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Ingrid is a cultured, elegant, vivacious woman, the centre of attention wherever she goes: to the opera house or art gallery or to drink champagne in the best cafe in the town. She is smiling, witty, has made a good, happy marriage, but her mind and memory are beginning to break down. Could there be a link with a deeply buried trauma concealed beneath the confident façade? Time and place now become unreliable: one minute she is in the present, the next, she is in the past, a girl at home with her parents, dreaming of her future. As her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, her family must constantly adjust to her changing moods and needs.

In her exquisitely written, prize-winning first novel, Rhiannon Ifans has achieved the extraordinary feat of conveying the experience of living with dementia, at first through the eyes of Ingrid herself, with her strategies for covering up her faux pas, but as her condition deteriorates, increasingly through the thoughts and reactions of her husband, son and daughter-in-law, their individual histories and personalities emerging as they try to cope with the evolving situation. Set in Stuttgart, whose character and geography are integral to the narrative, Ingrid is compassionate, deeply moving and utterly unforgettable.

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If there has ever been a work that deserves reading and re-reading, revisiting and discovering again and again until all the circles reveal themselves, this it it.

Meg Elis, Golwg