In the Blood

'Alcohol flows across families like water over a landscape. Sometimes it moves in torrents, sometimes in floods, sometimes in trickles. It always shapes the ground it covers in unmistakable ways.'

In the Blood is a memoir in two voices, a mother and daughter both in the grip of the disease that has ravaged generations of women in their family. Julia, aged sixty-five, and Arabella, thirty-eight, ended up in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous just nine months apart. In the Blood braids together their distinct but intertwined experience as mothers, daughters and alcoholics, in an effort to piece together a family's past silenced by shame.

In some ways it's a predictable story; in others, it is entirely unlike any account of motherhood or addiction that has ever been told. This is not a recovery memoir, but rather an unflinching family drama spanning generations, whilst looking pain and shame directly in the eye. It is the story of women who grew up in shadows, and have navigated their way out of darkness.

In The Blood is the sound of the howling cry of illness and betrayal across generations, and what you do with that sound when you hear it.