So many ways to begin
(Book)

Originally published : London, Bloomsbury, 2006.

"David Carter is an obsessive collector and the curator of a local history museum. In addition to archiving the community, he has kept an archive of his own life since he was a young boy, collecting sundry items that tell his story: birth certificate, school report cards, annotated cinema and train tickets." "David has tidy ideas about personal history; it can be cataloged and contained in boxes, devoid of mess and emotion. Or so he thinks ... until one day an addled old aunt exposes a long-buried family secret, forcing David to consider the possibility that his whole life has been constructed around a lie and all the artifacts he has collected don't add up to the truth at all." "In fits and starts David's world begins to unravel. Struggling to make sense of his past through his archive of photos, letters, and artifacts, David is driven forward, across wartime London and postwar Coventry, rural Ireland, and Aberdeen, Scotland, in a search for meaning and truth."--Jacket.

BSLW RECAT 2023