REMEMBER ME

From her miserable childhood in the 1930s through her increasingly troubled adulthood, a vagrant woman is doomed from birth, her few happy moments elusive if not delusional.

Seventy-two-year-old Winnie is sleeping in an abandoned shoe shop when she’s robbed of the “case” that holds the hodgepodge of mementos that add up to her life. Setting out to find the thief, a red-haired young woman who may be a figment of her imagination—Winnie’s hair was red as a girl—the old woman reaches for fragments of faltering memory. As a six-year-old named Patsy sitting in a corner at kindergarten because she’s unable to keep up, she is already marked as damaged goods. At home, her gentle but ineffectual father cares for her while her mother lies in bed beset by “ghosts.” After her mother’s half-understood suicide, Patsy is sent to her maternal grandfather, who renames her Lillian. When WWII breaks out, she is evacuated to her aunt Ena in the country, accompanied by her grandfather’s kindly boarder, with whom Aunt Ena has an affair until he too disappears (run off by the locals). When Patsy/Lillian is impregnated by Joe, another evacuated young Londoner with whom she hopes to run away to the end of the world, Aunt Ena packs her back to London. Unable to locate her grandfather (who has died), Patsy/Lillian becomes Winnie when she’s taken up by a clairvoyant who recognizes that she has the Gift—she now sees the ghosts her mother described. After the clairvoyant, Winnie is taken in by Mr. Hewitt, a shoe-shop owner, until he realizes that she’s the daughter of his brother, who ran away with Mr. Hewitt’s fiancé. Winnie ends up in a mental institution for 24 years, and when she’s released, life goes all the more downhill.

Second-novelist Azzopardi (the Booker-shortlisted Hiding Place, 2000) makes Winnie’s bleak life compelling by completing the jigsaw of her addled world piece by piece until it makes sense.