The Merrythought Paperback - 2008

The Merrythought is the first novel in three decades from 1977 Whitbread prizewinner Shelagh Macdonald ("No End to Yesterday" - now also republished by FireCrest), writing under her current name, Shelagh Meyer. Gee, an artist, is adrift: her marriage has been a sham and a shambles for years; now, she can no longer paint. As she trails through memories in a desperate search for some sense and a centre to her existence, Gee recalls her great-grandmother, Margaret Esther - known in the family as Granny McIvor. Gee's late father always said Granny McIvor was a po-faced, puritanical, self-righteous old baggage. But her aged Aunt Mildred, still hanging cheerily onto life on her farm in New Zealand, remembers otherwise. Even more intriguing: 'There were things in Granny McIvor's background we were never told. If we asked too much we were hushed up, ' she writes to Gee - whose energies suddenly now have a focus. And, as it turns out, Granny had good and startling reasons for keeping some aspects of her life very quiet indeed. As she unravels the mystery of Granny McIvor's life and character, Gee's own past and her present confusions begin to disentangle: especially the monstrous enigma that was her father, and the devastation he wrought on his family. Past and present echo and mirror one another as we follow a labyrinthine family history that bristles with cruelty, madness, and occasional hilarity, but is ultimately illuminated with its own kind of redemption.