Not the Sky

Gail Ashton's Not the Sky: a memoir up-ends a West Midlands working-class childhood and chaotic family to re-imagine the present.From the outside lavvy to backyards and gardens galore, Ashton confronts long-held secrets, ghosts, and converses with the dead. Meet a dying mother demanding a will and a prize-winning rose bowl; the estranged father with an email, rescued football boots and two glasses of Asti Spumante; the great-aunt transformed into a skylark; the sister and a DNA kit; an abusive grandfather and a failed guard dog. Meet inanimate objects, animals and miscarried babies.By turns comic, heartbreaking and life-affirming, this book plays with genre to question notions of memory and truth.p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }