Mamele by Gemma Reeves

Mamele is a bold and beautiful literary novel about the shape of one woman’s life after a brutal estrangement from her mother.

‘When my mother washed my hair she crooned, mamele, mamele, into my ear. Little mother, meaning little daughter, meaning you’re a good girl, Edie.’

Edie lives quietly in a crumbling country house in Broadstairs with her partner Joanna. They have spent two decades together since the death of Harry, the third member of their marriage. It’s a bohemian existence, but a happy one – and yet conversations about the mother who abandoned her have recently awoken in Edie feelings she long thought buried.

Edie reflects on her childhood as part of the post-war Jewish Diaspora in Maida Vale, and the heady, hedonistic years of 1960s London when she experienced her sexual awakening. Now approaching fifty, she wonders if there’s still time to become the woman she once yearned to be. The story of Edie’s life unfolds as a biting portrait of her mother emerges.

A searing, sexy and sophisticated novel, MAMELE asks questions about the most basic of all desires – to be loved – and shows how complex and bewildering the experience of estrangement can be. But ultimately this is a novel about hope, about survival, and about how it is never too late to begin again.

Gemma Reeves writes with extraordinary deftness and care of the difficult love between mothers and daughters, loneliness and aching desire, cultural inheritance and separation.