Grace Shiver is a multivocal meditation on violence, trauma, loss and renewal which wrestles with the seeming incommunicability of extreme experiences and the possibility that, as Heidegger suggests, What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said. The manuscript is divided into six sections, each of which employs different poetic strategies to engage with a wide range of personal and historical issues and the silences that surround them. Grace Shiver explores, through many stances, the place of the mother. This can be in terms of many elements: absence, inadequacy, frustration and a sense of being overwhelmed--as well as in terms of what Stonehouse calls "mother-like capacity" and "milk work"--in other words, as a compassionate witness. She uses the vantage point of motherhood in a variety of forms to examine a series of themes: loss, violence and renewal.

Cathy Stonehouse was a teenager in the UK when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Opening salvos in April 1982 would go on to become a 74-day war over who owned the British-held territory in the southernmost reaches of the Atlantic Ocean. Stonehouse, a young peace activist, was deeply affected by living in a country at war, one that seemed to happen only on television. Thirty years later, she began work on The Causes. This complex and unsettling debut novel follows the young Argentine conscript José Ramirez from his torture on the bleak plains of the Falklands, back into his childhood in pre-revolution Argentina, and forward across continents as he grapples with the loss of his father and his country as he knew it. When Carlos Ramirez is taken by force from his apartment, leaving behind only a pair of broken glasses, his son, Jose, is left with unanswerable questions. Questions which become even more existentially threatening after Jose is sent to the Malvinas to fight an impossible war. What does it mean to the world that's left, when an animal, or a human, disappears? Mysterious, gripping, poetic and magic-realist,The Causes is a love story for a threatened planet, set in Argentina, Spain, the UK and the South Atlantic.

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