Fierce Imaginings
by Rachel Mann, DLT, £12.99
Rachel Mann’s grandfather, Sam, owned a brown leather wallet, as “masculine as a shaving brush”. Mann would love the artefact to lead her back into memory but, with so little to go on, she worries that it is a “doomed task”. Then there’s the photo of Aunty Betty, taken in the early 1920s. Again, can Mann get close to the thoughts of such people and the lives they led?
All I know for sure is that Mann does great honour to her forebears by exploring what she can of their lives – above all, the devastating war that defined them and their generation.
