The Long Delirious Burning Blue, By Sharon Blackie

Cat Munro, a corporate lawyer who can cope, she believes and is told, with anything, one day has a panic attack before she has to take a flight. She reassures herself that this is only because it is the wrong kind of plane . The truth is that, for all her vaunted sanity, she is deeply troubled. Her pristinely passionless life reveals itself to be a tourniquet around an old wound: the pain created by an abusive father and an alcoholic mother, Laura.

Laura, in the meantime, is adjusting to solitary life in the Highlands. Cat will barely speak to her, and her husband is long gone. Laura's neighbour, Meg, an old woman of long memory, urges her to join an informal club dedicated to storytelling, where Celtic myths reawaken her to her past and to her muse. She must learn to swim through her memories, as her daughter must learn to fly away from hers.

Commonplaces of thought and feeling accumulate in this novel as if the author had hoped that they might reach critical mass and transmute into wisdom. It remains, however, hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story.