And, of course, there’s Patrick, a sweet-natured doctor whom Martha has known since her cousin brought him home from boarding school one Christmas after his father forgot to send him a plane ticket home. Woven into her story is her maladjusted family, who include her father, Fergus, a poet whose career stalled shortly after he was designated “a male Sylvia Plath” her mother, Celia, an alcoholic sculptor who is charismatic yet cruel and sister Ingrid, who is both protective of and exasperated by Martha. The actor Emilia Fox reads Mason’s darkly funny novel, capturing Martha’s fury and confusion as well as her acerbic wit (the comparisons to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag are not wide of the mark). Over the next 20 years, in order to deal with the chaos in her head, she continues to seek out confined, dark spaces where she lies “like a small animal that instinctively knows it’s dying”. When she was 17, on the morning of her French A-level exam, “a little bomb” went off in her brain, prompting her to go home and crawl under her father’s desk. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Martha has a mental health condition. I especially like the personal touch of not including the actual diagnosis in the book to show that it does not matter what it is, it is valid and you deserve to treat it with the same respect.Īnyway, I just inexplicably adore a sad book that managed to convince you why it has to be so damn sad.A pithy examination of marriage and mental illness shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction, Sorrow and Bliss begins as its protagonist Martha splits up with her forbearing husband, Patrick, and moves back into her parents’ house. I’m not sure I agree with every message in this book, but it is such a personal narrative that I cannot dispute it either. She is flawed and complicated and compelling, she made you frustrated and hopeless and sympathized and angry and sad with her.

But Sorrow and Bliss put me through all the range of emotions in the span of a few pages, and Martha is surely one of the most memorable protagonists I’ve ever read.

Some books are hard to describe with words. It is so depressingly and spectacularly human, and ironically enough I always read it when I was in public, and had to hold back tears every single time. This novel took so long to finish but whenever I actually sat down with it I could not put it down.

Review sorrow and bliss