Good Good Loving

Good Good Loving (Virago) by Yvvette Edwards presents the full span of a matriarch’s long-storied life in loving and childrearing, as told from her deathbed. The tumultuous decades of one British-Caribbean family’s complex, multi-branched tree are revealed through the bedbound mental wanderings of Ellen, who migrated in her youth from Montserrat to the United Kingdom. Ellen’s many years of sacrifice and hard graft are underwritten by her children’s lacklustre estimation of her character — can she somehow, on the verge of death, have the final say?