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Georgina Danforth Witley has never felt she has led anything but an ordinary life. But here she is on her way to meet the Queen. Born on April 21, 1926, the exact same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Georgie is one of 99 privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an 80th-birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive two hours to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that in her excited state, Georgie drives her car off the road, tumbling into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car, injured and unable to move but desperately hopeful that someone will find her, she must rely on her strength, her full store of family memories, her no-nonsense wit and a recitation of the names of the bones in her bodya long-forgotten exercise from childhood that reminds her she is still very much alive.
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Reviews
Itani writes in plain, simple, controlled prose, of family and the domestic world, and infuses it with significance, drama, pathos and passion that belie the apparent ordinariness of the lives she depicts.
Absorbing and thought-provoking, REMEMBERING THE BONES recalls similarly elegiac works, such as The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and holds the reader's attention to the end.
Itanis prose is lucid and engaging
Frances Itani doles out lucidity, empathy and poetry in crackling equal measures.
'No small accomplishment in an age of loud and discordant voices'
The novel's ending - both inevitable and surprising - is as subtle as it is wrenching. With this book Itani joins a group of novelists who have chronicled quiet lives from start to finish, uncovering treasure in their dark corners: Carol Shields with The Stone Diaries, Marilynne Robinson with Gilead
Who will remember the quiet lives, the ones unamplified by fame or glamour? ... This unsentimental narrator creates an effective feminine counterpoint to the aged male protagonist in Philip Roth's Everyman
In unpretentious, quietly penetrating prose, Itani exposes the richness and depth beneath the surface of one ordinary life.
The life story is moving, and the novel is skilfully written