Sarah Moss

Only weeks into their marriage a young couple embark on a six-month period of separation. Tom Cavendish goes to Japan to build lighthouses and his wife Ally, Doctor Moberley-Cavendish, stays and works at the Truro asylum. As Ally plunges into the institutional politics of mental health, Tom navigates the social and professional nuances of late 19th century Japan. With her unique blend of emotional insight and intellectual profundity, Sarah Moss builds a novel in two parts from Falmouth to Tokyo, two maps of absence; from Manchester to Kyoto, two distinct but conjoined portraits of loneliness and determination. An exquisite continuation of the story of Bodies of Light, Signs for Lost Children will amaze Sarah Moss's many fans.

Signs for Lost Children

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Let rich men have their games: it is entertaining if not edifying for the rest of us to see how like the daydreams of little girls are the trappings of masculine wealth.

There is always endurance as there is always air, because there is no alternative.

Annie speak of men whose sympathy for women's suffrage lasts only until they find themselves obliged to pour their own tea.

It is a mausoleum, it is the inverse of Noah's Ark.

“That, as we know, the majority of patients are female, and many of their troubles begin in exactly those crises of life where it is most desirable that women should be attended by women…”

Mamma never understood the power of courtesy, or that not every battle needs to be fought every time. Feminine wiles, Mamma would say, the cowardly tactics of those who fear the judgements of fools and care more for worldliness than salvation. Did the Son of God depend on toadying and sweet words? Did he fear to offend the money-lenders in the temple?

 Although of course contrition is often taken to excess, especially in women. And self-awareness, she has often thought, is a marker of sanity but not of happiness.

Here is beauty in time, in the turning of the trees, the rising and falling of the water, in the slow breathing of this land.

And in your view, she wants to ask, is Mrs Minhinnet mad or only damaged? Is she, in fact, telling truths that no-one wants to hear? Because if, she sometimes thinks, if all the women in here who speak of indecent things, who recount endlessly obscene acts and unnatural couplings, are speaking from unhappy experience, then their madness may be perfectly reasonable. May be the inevitable response of a healthy mind to things that should not happen. And if that is the case, then the primary problem is not so much with the minds of some women as with the acts of some men. Older men, almost invariably. Men with power. 

Who among us is not haunted? Who does not walk in the shadow of those who are not here? Our dead are always with us and yet always lost. Only those who die young, she thinks, will not be inhabited by dead voices, by shadowy glimpses of figures long fallen to dust. Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past. There is no clear border between insanity and grief, no basis for a limit to the permis- sible time of mourning, A time to reap, a time to sow, she thinks. Mrs Ashton is caught in the season of grief. Time passes, but there are many purposes under heaven that find no season here.

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