Books

Book review: Adopted woman’s dream of finding her mum becomes a nightmare

In Mother’s Day Anna Rampion finally meets her birth mother, but Marlene turns out to be the mother of all evil mothers in a bleak tale of motherhood told in a sometimes clunky, uneven style

Abigail Burdess’s twisty, darkly comic novel Mother’s Day is both confused and confusing in parts. Picture: Kevin Murphy

As Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse so memorably goes, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad.” Had Larkin ever encountered Marlene ‘Ma’ Mather from Abigail Burdess’s novel Mother’s Day, he mightn’t have bothered with the “and dad” – for this woman is capable of destroying any child single-handed.

Anna Rampion is 37 and has worked as a temp for eight years. Her job is to record the impact of therapy on survivors of ...