Struggling to bear the legacy of her grandparents’ experience of the Holocaust and her mother’s desperate fragility, Sally seeks to reconnect with her brother Steven. Once close, Steven seems a stranger to her now that he has left London for Brighton. The echoes of their history once bound them––but it is an inheritance Steven can no longer share.
Starlings reaches back through three generations of inherited trauma, exploring how the impact of untold stories ricochets down the years. As Sally winds her way back to catch the moment when Steven slipped away, she collects the fractured words and sliding memories that might piece together her grandparents’ journeys. Having always looked through the eyes of ghosts she cannot appease, she at last comes to hear what speechless mouths might have said: perhaps Before may be somewhere we can never truly leave behind and After simply the place we must try to make our home.
In delicate brushstrokes, this extraordinary first novel captures a family unravelling as the unspeakable finds a voice. It is by turns sad, hopeful, and deeply compelling.
Miranda Gold is a writer based in London. Her first novel, Starlings, published by Karnac in December 2016, reaches back through three generations to explore how the impact of untold stories about the Holocaust ricochets down the years. She has taken part in Jewish Book Week and was on the panel for 'Reading as Alchemy' at Waterstones Gower Street. Before turning her focus to fiction, Miranda took the Soho Theatre Course for young writers, where her play, Lucky Deck, was selected for development and performance. She is now crowd-funding with the award winning Unbound to publish her second novel, A Small Dark Quiet. In her review for The Tablet, Sue Gaisford described Starlings as 'a strange, sad, original and rather brilliant first novel, illumined with flashes of glorious writing and profound insight, particularly into the ways in which we attempt to reinvent ourselves'.