Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore

Description

Bibliographic Details

• Author: Helen Dunmore
• Title: Mourning Ruby
• Publisher: ‎ G. P. Putnam's Sons
• Publication Date: February 23, 2004
• Language: ‎ English
• Format: Hardcover – 278 pages
• ISBN-10: ‎ 0399151486
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0399151484
• Item Weight: ‎ 1.25 pounds
• Dimensions: ‎ 6.3 x 1.06 x 9.5 inches
• Reading age: ‎ 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher
• Book Condition: Used – Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Excellent

Synopsis:

Abandoned as a baby, Rebecca has no tie to her parents other than the men's size-eleven shoebox in which she was found. Yet she grows from a child of no one and nowhere into a woman who creates her own unorthodox but tender family.

First, there is Joe-a brilliant historian and loyal friend who longs for more than Rebecca can give him, but whose devotion sustains her. Adam, Joe's friend, is the man who becomes her husband. And Ruby is the daughter whom Rebecca loves with almost unbearable intensity.

Then this hopeful life is dealt a blow that could shatter the strongest ties. Rebecca flees her marriage, and Adam sinks into a life numbed by routine and isolation.

In the end, it is Joe who enables them to find the way back to understanding, and offers Rebecca a history that she can call her own.

Illuminated by both sorrow and vivid joy, Mourning Ruby is ultimately about the transcendent power of storytelling itself. 

About the Author:

Helen Dunmore FRSL (12 December 1952 – 5 June 2017) was a British poet, novelist, and short story and children's writer.

Her best known works include the novels Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter and The Siege, and her last book of poetry Inside the Wave. She won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction, the National Poetry Competition, and posthumously the Costa Book Award.

Dunmore was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1952, the second of four children of Betty (née Smith) and Maurice Dunmore. She attended Sutton High School, London and Nottingham Girls' High School, then direct grant grammar schools.

She studied English at the University of York, and lived in Finland for two years (1973–75) and worked as a teacher. She lived after that in Bristol. Dunmore was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL). Some of Dunmore's children's books are included in reading schemes for use in schools.

In March 2017, she published her last novel, Birdcage Walk, as well as an article about mortality for The Guardian written after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died on 5 June 2017. Her final poetry collection Inside the Wave, published in April 2017 shortly before her death, posthumously won the Poetry and overall Book of the Year awards in the 2017 Costa Book Awards.