The Way the Day Breaks

Set in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, The Way the Day Breaks is a novel about family, love and mental illness. They are a close-knit family: we see them around the dinner table and follow them on car-trips over the dales, off into France. They discuss nature, speculate on the future, dream up get-rich schemes, laugh, quarrel and try to hold together. But there is a darker current. Dad is changing: his schemes become wilder, his behaviour more erratic. The family find it increasingly harder to understand: sometimes it seems that he may be beyond help. His eventual breakdown has effects that resonate throughout the decades. As formally inventive as it is narratively rich, the story is told through dialogue between the family and, twenty years later, the reflections of the youngest son, Michael, as he tries to make sense of his father's life and his own. The Way the Day Breaks is a heartfelt, moving and brutally honest account of the effects of mental illness on all who are forced to live with it.