'An unforgettable and profound novel about three generations of one family and the healing power of understanding where you've come from.
'As a teenager in the 1970s, Sarah is forced to leave her home in upstate New York to accompany a missionary to Idaho. When she falls pregnant, she is despatched to relatives in Sydney, who place her in a home for unmarried mothers. Years later her daughter, Bet, pieces together her mother's life story, hoping to understand her better. As she learns more about Sarah's past, Bet struggles to come to terms with her own history and identity, yet is determined to make peace with Sarah's choices before it's too late.
'Lucy Neave's moving and deeply personal second novel, Believe in Me, explores the relationships between mothers and their children across three generations of one family. The book questions what we can ever truly know of our parents' early lives, even as their experiences weave ineffably into our identities and destinies.' (Publication summary)
Epigraph:
... any life, she had to believe, was nothing
but the continuity of its love.
Eudora Welty, The Optimist's Daughter
'Cages abound in Lucy Neave’s sad, engrossing new novel Believe in Me. In some instances – such as birds that need rescuing – they’re lifesavers. In others, they’re psychic prisons that are horribly damaging to both bodies and minds. This is a story of mothers and daughters, each entrapped in her own way by her skin and her secrets and by the expectations of others, mortal and celestial.' (Introduction)
'Halfway through Lucy Neave’s new novel Believe in Me, there is an astonishing scene in which an orphaned foal is dressed in the skin of a newly dead foal, the skewbald coat threaded with baling twine and the strings knotted under the throat and chest. Disguised in this fleshy coat, strands of bloody muscle still clinging to it, the foal is presented hopefully to its foster mother. The novel’s main protagonist, Bet, is sceptical: ‘It’s condescending: as if a mare could be fooled by putting her dead foal’s skin on another foal.’ Sure enough, the grieving mare rejects the starving foal, stamping her hooves and moving around uneasily in the stable. Later that night, when Bet goes to check on the animals, she finds them nestled together: ‘Dark shapes, they moved together, away from me, as though they’d been startled from a dream.’ Stunned at this unexpected communion, Bet retreats into her own solitude: ‘I turned off the light, bolted the door and walked back through dew-soaked grass to bed, seeing again the mare and foal, nose to tail. They had no need of me.’' (Introduction)
'Halfway through Lucy Neave’s new novel Believe in Me, there is an astonishing scene in which an orphaned foal is dressed in the skin of a newly dead foal, the skewbald coat threaded with baling twine and the strings knotted under the throat and chest. Disguised in this fleshy coat, strands of bloody muscle still clinging to it, the foal is presented hopefully to its foster mother. The novel’s main protagonist, Bet, is sceptical: ‘It’s condescending: as if a mare could be fooled by putting her dead foal’s skin on another foal.’ Sure enough, the grieving mare rejects the starving foal, stamping her hooves and moving around uneasily in the stable. Later that night, when Bet goes to check on the animals, she finds them nestled together: ‘Dark shapes, they moved together, away from me, as though they’d been startled from a dream.’ Stunned at this unexpected communion, Bet retreats into her own solitude: ‘I turned off the light, bolted the door and walked back through dew-soaked grass to bed, seeing again the mare and foal, nose to tail. They had no need of me.’' (Introduction)
'Cages abound in Lucy Neave’s sad, engrossing new novel Believe in Me. In some instances – such as birds that need rescuing – they’re lifesavers. In others, they’re psychic prisons that are horribly damaging to both bodies and minds. This is a story of mothers and daughters, each entrapped in her own way by her skin and her secrets and by the expectations of others, mortal and celestial.' (Introduction)
