Echoes of Dissonance

Margaret Talbot has spent most of her adult life telling people what she thinks. After twenty-two years as the headteacher of a Liverpool primary school, retirement has required a certain amount of adjustment.

Then, at sixty-three, she is diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.

Margaret considers the treatments available and decides against chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Her daughter Anna, already balancing a demanding career with raising two children, struggles to accept that decision. Her son Ben desperately wants his mother to reconsider, while difficulties in his own relationship threaten the wedding he and Claire have spent months arranging.

Margaret has no intention of allowing her illness to become the only subject anybody discusses. She still has opinions about education, an occasionally exasperating friendship with Eleanor, books she intends to finish and a lifetime of memories involving her late husband David and the two children they raised together.

Yet as her health deteriorates, the familiar disagreements acquire consequences that none of them can easily resolve. Margaret must confront her own mistakes, the limitations of her independence and the possibility of leaving important things unsaid. Her family must reckon with the difference between caring for somebody and making their decisions for them.

Echoes of Dissonance is a moving, thought-provoking novel about marriage, parenthood, faith, grief and the complicated business of loving people whose choices we cannot always accept. It is also the story of a woman whose sixty-three years have contained considerably more than her family will ever fully know.