Alice Fitzgerald’s Her Mother’s Daughter is told through the eyes of these two characters, the narration shifting cleverly in perfect tones as the overarching story is told. Touching on family dynamics, trauma, the mother-daughter relationship and change, it’s a thematically intense novel that has many light moments.

I caught up with Alice to find out more.

This is your first novel; how long has the story been in your head for?

The story has been in my head for as long as I can remember, in some shape or form. I am London-born to Irish parents, and I’ve always been intrigued by ideas of home and belonging, which come through in the novel. In the end, the whole story is built around one summer holiday to Ireland because I remember those summers so well. None of mine ended like Clare and Josephine’s though!

Is any of the story from your own background?

Yes. I’m London-born to Irish parents, and my parents’ marriage also came to an end, as Josephine and Michaels’ does. My mum isn’t Josephine though, she is a character inspired by many women who I know and don’t know, who have been victims of abuse and are tormented by their past and their struggle with mental health. She is so many women, I think, struggling with motherhood and what that is, the pressures of society on women and what we should be, what we should look like…

You speak a bit about dieting in the book and about the importance of being a ‘good’ girl – do you think that the pressure to conform to certain is one of the social forms of oppression that exists? It almost echoes the mother’s personal abuse.

Absolutely. There are messages about being a ‘good’ girl, a ‘beautiful’ girl, a ‘perfect’ girl, a ‘slim/skinny’ girl, everywhere. They all merge and fuse and get mixed up and I don’t even know the difference between them. I wanted to capture what it is to be female, and a victim, and how we often are victims, to more or less extent, at some point in our lives.

What interests you about the mother-daughter relationship?

Everything! That we soak up so much from our mothers, how they shape us, how their traumas, or hang-ups, or attitudes, are passed on to us, and in turn how we pass them on to our own daughters. A mother is a child’s first home, and she remains that in some way for the rest of a child’s life.

Mesmerising is a word bandied about a lot by music journos and bloggers, but it truly applies to Lowly. Textured, oneiric, shifting and mysterious the Danish band’s latest track Deer Eyes is full of cascading synths and panoramic sweeps of rich keyboard melodies that synthesitically meld together. Restless and shifting yet also calming, the five piece have blended together the influences of their own musical backgrounds in an inventive way. Their debut album is out next year, and they will be popping to the UK in October.

https://soundcloud.com/bella-union/deer-eyes

In fact, much of what Ed describes in the first person narration will be familiar to anyone who has encountered mental distress or ill health in any way. In the street people edge away from him ‘like they are scared that my sadness is infectious.’ He has friends, but for the main these are pub and club buddies, and besides, when you ask someone how they are, no one actually wants to know. Isolated and fighting, he tries to run away from his reality and emotions. But salvation and happiness isn’t to be found in a piece of cake, a glass of wine, or the harder stuff that he resorts to.

This short novel is punchy and to the point, detailing his pub fuelled nights, coke binges, dealings with dealers, fights and police warnings, and a suicide attempt that sees him in a psychiatric ward. It’s not for the easily shaken, because it does not glamourise addiction, depression, or suicide, but paints them in the stark and bleak colours that they cloud lives with. Simply written, it’s never going to be one of the literary greats, and certain areas of Ed’s life, such as his teaching career and relationships with family are not as satisfyingly developed as they could be, but this honest depiction of a harrowing experience is well worth a read.

Default Setting: A Nervous Breakdown is available as a download for £2.99 on I-tunes, Amazon, Google Play andKobo.

Two people, ten guest musicians, a haunt of instruments, and an album of subtle beauty. August and After, also known as Ned Mortimer and Vedantha Kumar, release Embers, an album with a title well chosen, its beauty lying in its gentle flickering rather than any brash roar. Music of a vespertine air, as the day closes and house lights start to dim.
Opener Halley explores a journey, the growth of a life and the two people sharing it together, one of many stories in song form of past experiences. Woven between the lines of all the songs on this album these personal reflections and explorations are so welcoming that they create the feeling that not only are you enveloped in the fabric of the songs, feeling every emotion, but there is nowhere else that you would rather be.
Gleam Behind The Ghosts is given a body of its own in the wholesome string section, and the aching pathos of Waltz For Marie is the how all stories should sound. A quivering guitar on Salamander slowly nullifies any angst, beautifully enunciated diction of lyrics such as ‘apples cling to stratospheres’ in The Orchard add to the variegated beauty within this set of songs, and personal favourite The Jailbreak Song bounces off its boundaries, flexing muscles in a sparse space, fans contributing the foreign spoken word.
A rich tapestry of sounds, each of varying thickness and complexity, all added to a band of aural excellence. It’s hard not to believe that each sound on this record has been nurtured and grown with love and reverence. Art fans to the core, their live performances are a visual experience, and the duo have a series of collaborative film projects scheduled for the summer, including two animations, a contemporary dance video with the UCL dance society and Tripos Productions, a video project with the London School of and have created an independent art platform, whereby fans and artists submit their art as an accompaniment to the songs.
Celebrate their album launch on June 14th at The Islington.

From the opening gentle picking pattern on Rain At Night and the first time we are introduced to the warm wholesome vocals of Malena, through to the final lulls of Si Quedamos the debut EP from Oh So Quiet is one uses strings and strums to their full effect, being soothing and fluid whilst simultaneously dazzlling. Whilst being a ‘folk’ band they sound more at home in urban streets, the five songs on this EP having a feeling about them of not only living a life, but being scarred by it. Bubbling with wonderment throughout, the EP flickers and flutters with a gentle authority. Motorcycle Journey has a euphoric post verse riff, and Water’s Fall is so hauntingly delicate your ears are almost scared to listen too closely until it fights back with chimes and charm. The output of Argentinian pair Lucas and Malena Zavala, who currently live in Guildford and have substantiated the band with multicultural members Oh So Quiet combine indigenous Latin-American music with western world indie and folk to create something currently missing in the somewhat saturated folk scene, and are more than worth investigating.
A special Cool For Cats party is taking place at Tipsy in Dalston to celebrate the release.