th
Penguin
ISBN: 9781415207444
Format: Paperback
Recommended Price: R220.00
Published: August 2015
Iris Langley is forced to take charge when her mother, Grace, has a stroke. This is no easy task: Iris suffers from the lingering effects of a near-fatal fall as a child. The accident turned her mind into a place where a dragon lives: one that roars in her ears and fills her head with smoke. As her mother retreats into dementia, Iris realises that Grace is hiding something – a secret about that fateful day in the mountains that could threaten everything she believes about herself and her family. But with her own memory fragmented, and Grace’s mind in tatters, how can she find the truth? Set against the sombre beauty of the Drakensberg mountains, Bridget Pitt’s powerful new novel takes us into the labyrinthine world of brain injury, and reveals how the strands of guilt, secrecy and devotion that bind mother to daughter may devastate or redeem them.
Praise for Notes from the Lost Property Department
Bridget Pitt has taken on a daunting task ... and succeeded with flair in creating a wonderfully complex book about memory and forgetting, healing and remembering... the author shows a remarkable ability to inhabit her characters and bring to life throughout the novel. [This is] one of the most beautiful and moving books I have read in many years – Jennifer Crocker Cape Times
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Pitt's growing stature on the South African literary scene is well-deserved for her characters are subtly and sensitively drawn. Her fictional relationships whether between an arrogant pre-teen and a shy withdrawn one; once young lovers who meet again in middle age; or the often tortured relationship between mothers and daughters - are unerringly portrayed – Sue Grant-Marshall Business Day
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This is a beautifully crafted belated coming of age story as Iris finally reconciles with her adult self and the secrets that stunted her own life and that of her mother. Guilt, sacrifice, secrets, unrequited and dangerously requited love, memory, ageing, death and identity are explored in precise and humane writing, all helped along by a judicious smattering of William Butler Yeats poems – Aspasia Karras Times Live
http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2015/10/13/Reviews-Her-stories
The struggle to forget, or not; courage in small things – Bridget Pitt’s new novel has found a voice for wounded memory. It’s a searching voice, evoking from jumbled discards something that perhaps we’ve all lost … but which might still be found – Jeremy Cronin, author of More than a Casual Contact, Inside and Out and Even the Dead: Poems, Parables and a Jeremiad.
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Notes from the Lost Property Department is a funny and quirky story about family, but also a tender and absorbing look at brain injury. It’s an examination of identity, of what makes a person what she is, and about her place in the world – Andrea Van Wyk Rant and Rave Reviews
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