When we meet Nora, she is a grumpy old woman getting ready to die. Although that may sound like the most depressing opening to a book, don’t let it put you off Days of Grace. This sad, warm, funny story is so full of heart and love , you’ll be thinking about it for weeks after finishing. Through it, Catherine Hall manages to tell story of love, desire and repression and how forgiveness is sometimes the most important thing in your life.

Nora remembers back to when she was twelve and sent to Kent as an evacuee during the Second World War. She is heart-broken to leave behind her doting mother, but settles into country life quite quickly as she is befriended by her new ‘sister’, Grace.

As the narrative switches from modern Nora to the Nora of the 1940s, we learn that she has spent her life chasing happiness in the form of the love of her life, the elusive Grace.

Her life in Kent is idyllic, swimming in a local lake, picking berries, lying back on the grass as the sun warms her face. However, not is all as it seems.

This sense of an under-current that can rip you away if central to Catherine Hall’s excellent book. Nora never fits in; not into Kent, nor London when she returns; not into her own family and not into her own skin. She wants to be more; to take care of Grace’s mother, her own mother and to be everything she can be for Grace.

As children the pair are inseparable and, as Nora begins to recognise that the feelings she is having are less sisterly than they should be, she panics. She knows of no one who ever felt this way, is it even possible for two girls to be lovers? So she does what she thinks is best – she says nothing. For years.

Modern-day Nora is by now so used to repressing her emotions, of protecting her vulnerabilities that she can be a bit of a bitch. She knows it, and tries to overcome it but, when you’ve plugged the river of words for so many years, it turns out to be impossible even when you want to speak,

In her later years, Nora meets and takes in a young woman Rose and her child, also called Grace. The odd family they create brings a warmth into Nora’s life that she hasn’t felt for years, and it starts to open her up. Just as she is leaving the world, she may just be able to rest in peace.

You know that this time-line difference works when you are disappointed every time you’ve to leave the modern to go to the past, just to be disappointed allover again when you’ve to leave the past to go to the modern. Hall has penned a compelling book, tough at times but worth every moment.

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