An invitation to the open sea, to dreams and travel with this novel describing the south of Australia, Tasmania, and the White Continent, the great South. Mary does not want to live in an old folks’ home.
Certainly, she is very old, ill, but with her faculties intact, she does not want to die in a hospital bed. She decides to make a pilgrimage into her past, to find the island with its lighthouse where she lived with Jack, her husband, and their three children.
Thus, we follow the elderly lady respectfully as she evokes the album of her life. Mary, with the help of Tom, her son, finds this haven where she forged her destiny. There is the forest ranger, slightly gruff, but who gradually becomes, if not her friend, then her accomplice and confidant.
Karen Viggers offers us here a beautiful and poignant story. The story of these elderly people who are put into nursing homes to ease others’ consciences.
A novel that will allow us to question the humanity or inhumanity of these places where we store our elders like old, useless objects. Yet Mary proves the opposite by telling us her life and her experience of existence.
