From fantasticfiction:
This beautifully woven masterpiece, spare yet richly told, plumbs the undercurrents of family life and tragedy in a startling and wise story of love, fate, and survival.

Ellen Van Bemmel lives with her parents, who run an American news-clipping service, and her three siblings in an old Dutch house in a suburb of Amsterdam. Ellen's idyllic childhood is suffused with Americana, both the frivolous fringes like potato chips and Coca-Cola as well as milestones like Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, until family disaster strikes on her twelfth birthday. From that moment on her world begins to unravel.

Years later, Ellen plunges us into the past as she leafs through a faded photo album and confronts the literal and figurative ghosts of her childhood.

Seamlessly alternating the past and present, taut with Hitchcockian tension and warmed by a redemptive love story, A Heart of Stone tells a darkly humorous, yet ultimately compassionate tale.

I found this totally compelling, the switching between past & present meant that hints of events to come were enticingly fed through & kept me on tenterhooks as what I suspected was proven. Postpartum depression isn't a subject I'd choose for my reading matter but I think the writer does a really good job of portraying the anguish of both the mother & the effect the illness has on the rest of the family.

The blurb in the above JE says the story is warmed by a redemptive love story, personally I can't see that but do agree that it is darkly humourous which contrasts nicely with the severity of the subject matter ( the dry humour reminded me very much of Kate Atkinson).

Added to Kev's Random Bookbox :o)

Taken from Kev's random bookbox.