Product Description

More than thirty years ago, a mother laid her newborn baby in a shoebox and left it by the bins in the backyard of an Italian restaurant. Now the baby, Rebecca, is a mother herself, and she and her husband Adam are about to experience the greatest tragedy parents can face. Like a Russian doll, this novel opens to reveal a brilliant richness of stories locked within. MOURNING RUBY is Helen Dunmore’s most ambitious novel to date, hugely moving and strongly plotted, about memory and history - both personal and public - about love, loss and mourning, and ultimately about the most important relationship in any novel - that of the reader to the writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217640 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Described on its jacket as resembling "a Russian Doll", Helen Dunmore's Mourning Ruby is certainly more of an assemblage of interconnected tales than a full novel. It's a work that plays the old "stories within stories" game; there are quotes from poems (Mandelstam, Byron, Dickinson and some of Dunmore's own pieces) and folk songs and nearly the last third of the book is given over to shards of a novel in progress written by one of the characters. As in Talking to the Dead and With Your Crooked Heart, the main protagonists here--Rebecca, her husband Adam, and Joe, her old flatmate, a Stalin-obsessed writer--form another of Dunmore's intriguing sexual/sibling triangles.

As the title confirms though, it's the death of Rebecca and Adam's child, Ruby, in a road accident that dominates. In the depiction of this horrific incident, Dunmore at one point breaks into verse, crystallising in just a few sparse, stream of consciousness lines Rebecca's agony as, impotently, she watches the tragedy unfold: "She always stops at roads, she's never run into a road, but look how fast she's going Adam, she's too far ahead, the gap between them, stop Ruby, stop Ruby, stop Rubystop."

Rebecca's loss is even greater because she is herself a lost child, a foundling who was abandoned in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. But, if this is a book about the many permutations of loss, it is equally about creativity, artistic as well as biological. Through Rebecca's encounters with her boss, Mr Damiano, the former circus impresario turned hotelier, and Joe's "story", Dunmore salutes, through the very medium of fiction itself, the healing power of the imagination. --Travis Elborough

About the Author
Helen Dunmore has published seven novels with Viking and Penguin: Zennor In Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell Of Winter which won the Orange Prize; Talking to The Dead, Your Blue Eyed Boy, With Your Crooked Heart 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.

Customer Reviews

Startlingly beautiful
Helen Dunmore never fails to amaze with her unique skill of creating poetry out of prose - "Mourning Ruby" is one of the best books I have read all year, and there have been many!

There are several stories running through one main tale: that of a mother and father mourning their dead child. But theirs is not the only tale of loss and grief. Dunmore manages to make even the most minor of characters live and breathe, and the ending, surprisingly, is uplifting and positive; something you don't expect throughout the book. Read it once for the enjoyment of the story, then go back again and revel in the words, strung together like gems on a necklace.

Breathtaking ....
The structure of this wonderful book is complex, but Dunmore's poetic prose flows so gracefully across the pages, that it quite simply takes you by the hand and leads you gently but surely through its rich layers of stories within stories within stories without putting a step wrong.

The main story is about a mother (herself an abandoned child) and father trying to deal with the death of their young daughter. The awful moment when Ruby races from one parent to another into the path of an oncoming car is heartstopping in its shocking finality. It reminded me of the equally shocking moment in Ian McKewn's 'A Child In Time', when a father, out shopping, suddenly realises that his child has disappeared. In both cases the reader is overwhelmed by the absence of this small person whose energy spilled onto the page only a moment ago, but now is gone. As that absence fills their lives, so it spreads its influence across the whole book and its cast of characters both 'real' and fictional - and while the layering of stories means that there are a large number of characters (and voices) in this book, I felt that I knew and cared for even the most minor of them.

Mourning Ruby is beautifully crafted and takes the reader on an emotional and searching journey. Although it is laced with grief it is also about hopes and dreams. This book is not, in the end, about death, its about the joy and pain of living.

a read jewel
Helen Dunmore has a vivid mind in Mourning Ruby. A tale of love and loss, unrequited futures and relationships missing a beat. The quagmire of making sense of what was after it has gone and what could be that will never arrive.

Mourning Ruby sets experience rolling, remembering it like a film on loop. It’s said that our memory never forgets a single frame of our life. Yet we live our memory through the stories it creates, editing and mixing a million and one emotions to a few scenarios.

Rebecca is Dunmore’s voice. She is born to a mysterious mother who abandons her new born in a shoebox outside the back door of an Italian restaurant. This is Rebecca’s history as she seeks to recover where she belongs and her place in the world. That past is beyond her reach, but it transpires that her one hope of rebuilding a present is torn from her by the tragic death of her daughter Ruby. This leads to the breakdown of her marriage and a realisation of importance of the enigmatic, intellectual lynchpin Joe, a former flatmate, Stalin biographer, who introduces her to life and culture and cooking. And Mr Damiano, her hotel owner boss, with a circus past that mixes tragedy and loss, romance and self motivation who Rebecca finds so elusive and awe-inspiring. And it is his story that is the most beautifully told, rising above misfortune, that binds the whole plot. She hears it and then sleeps for a day and a half. She is almost reborn. He becomes Rebecca’s necessary (god) father.

Mourning Ruby is a book about stories telling us how it is, it is a book about missing reality and having to be told to be reminded. It’s heartfelt and beautifully written, uplifting and sad and introducing the tricky confusion of intimacy with sexuality. Why sometimes to find true meaning in our lives it helps to find someone to tell us.

It is not a straightforward meander through a set plot. It is clever with its literary machinations; poetry introducing prose for each chapter; stories within stories.

Sweep through it and enjoy. It’s worth it.