Blue - Grey Island

How do you enter a world that is stripped of language?
This is Mannie’s dilemma as she enters Ward B on a hot July’s day, to visit her husband Ralph.

Ralph, an eminent cosmologist and talented artist, has dementia and is forced to exist outside of a ‘normal’ world. The story reflects back to the early stages of Ralph’s illness where he describes his first MRI scan as an island, a blue-grey flintstoned landscape. This landscape becomes the place where Ralph’s confused inner world resides - a world fleshed out by fragmented memories of his childhood, his troubled relationship with his father and a life-long quest to bring into harmony Science and Religion.

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The past impacts on the present and the presence of memory, in all of its subtle and more obvious forms, is woven within a tapestry of events that begin in Paris 1886 and lead up to the present day. As such, this is both an historical novel and a story of our time. 

Blue-Grey Island has been described as delicately written, full of energy and ideas.

The novel explores the theme of what constitutes personal identity and offers a way into understanding dementia. It is primarily a story about human relationships - told through the history of Ralph’s family, which has been shrouded in mystery. It is also a novel of ideas that raises many questions concerning the conflict between faith and rational knowledge, the role of the artistic imagination in the survival of a troubled mind, and how we might find a way to communicate with another’s confusion.

Original cover design is an image from an embroidery entitled 'Rain on the Water' by Eileen Harrisson. www.eileenharrisson.com

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