Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful

I sat down with this extraordinary book one Sunday and read it from cover to cover. This is no trumpeting testament to my reading skills, but rather a tribute to Deborah Kay Davies, whose novel (well, series of interlinked stories) about two sisters cuts to the very heart of what it means to have a sibling – and to grow up.

Spanning more than 30 years in the lives of Grace and Tamar and their family, Davies’s stories are short, sharp snapshots of childhood, adolescence, coming-of-age, marriage, divorce and the messiness of all the living that has to go on in between. Each story has a primal beauty running through it; each bubbles with the essence of the natural world and the shocking urgency of blood – a scraped shin, a punctured eye, the onset of menstruation or the clawmarks of a violent dog. Life, Davies seems to be saying, is bloody, and life is a fight, but pumping beneath this antagonism – this struggle for primacy – is the concentrated and illogical binding liquid force of family. Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful won the 2009 Wales Book of the Year, but it deserves to be successful far beyond its setting, for Davies’s themes are universal and her writing startling.