3 ideas
In the late nineteenth century Ruby's great-grandmother Alice leaves her husband and children to follow a travelling French photographer, and her daughters, Nell among them, grow up without her. That absence is one of the strands that shape the distance and thwarted longing in how later mothers treat their children. It works alongside oppressive marriages, domestic drudgery, war and disappointed hopes rather than explaining them all.
Ordinary objects such as buttons, photographs and ornaments pass silently from generation to generation. Each carries a story of love, loss or war that its current owner no longer knows. The novel's footnotes attach these hidden histories to the objects, so a family home becomes a museum whose occupants live among exhibits they cannot read.
The family's version of its own past leaves things out: Alice's departure, for one, is not openly told to later generations. The family history they pass on is a selective account rather than a full one, and the novel's narration restores what the family's telling omits.