Twice The Speed Of Dark

by Lulu Allison

A mother and daughter circle each other, bound by love, separated by fatal violence.

Dismayed by the indifference she sees in the news to people who die in distant war and terror, Anna writes portraits of the victims, trying to understand the real impact of their deaths.

Meanwhile Anna's daughter, killed by a violent boyfriend, tells her own story from the perplexing realms of death, reclaiming herself from the brutality.

Anna's life is stifled by heartache; it is only through these acts of love for strangers that she allows herself an emotional connection to the world.

Can Anna free herself from the bondage of grief and find a connection to her daughter once more?

Genres: Fiction

224 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 24, 2017

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lulu Allison's second novel Salt Lick was my favourite of the 12 books I read from this year's Women's Prize longlist, and its exclusion was the biggest disappointment of the shortlist. This is her debut novel, which was also published via the crowdfunding site Unbound.

This is also an impressive book, but I found it harder to read, perhaps because it has such dark themes. At its heart is Anna, a woman of a certain age now living on her own near Oxford. The central event of the book is the death ten years earlier of Anna's 19-year old Caitlin, who was killed by her violent and possessive boyfriend Ryan, who has now been released from his jail term for manslaughter. Anna's grief has also triggered the end of her marriage, and her coping mechanism involves imagining and writing down details of the lives of the unnamed victims of the violent incidents around the world that she hears about in the news. After seeing Ryan in the street, Anna decides to take a Christmas holiday in Tenerife.

Anna's parts of the story are told by an omniscient third person, but are alternated with the thoughts of Caitlin's disembodied spirit, who is unable to help her mother come to terms with her grief. This is a bigger part of the book than the cow chorus in Salt Lick, but has a similar effect of leavening the story with a different perspective.

A book that deserves a wider readership.

[Mairead Hearne (swirlandthread.com) · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Who mournes the death of strangers?’

Twice the Speed of Dark is the debut novel from Unbound author Lulu Allison. Just published, it tells the story of a mother and daughter who, although separated through death, are still tied together with invisible threads!!

This is quite a profound book and the first book in a long time that I felt the need to read out loud…

Twice the Speed of Dark is a very complex novel dealing with the subject of tormented grief in quite an unusual manner. Anna is totally immersed in grieving for her daughter Caitlin who was brutally taken from her ten years previously. Unable to cope with life, Anna moves around in a permanent state of despair, seeing very little in her day that gives her hope. After the murder of Caitlin, Anna’s marriage disintegrated as her husband Michael was no longer able to deal with the constant presence of Caitlin in every minute of their lives. Michael needed to move on in any way he could, but always with Caitlin’s memory close to his heart. Anna is unable to do this and is eaten up inside with the pain of losing her only daughter.

Anna has some very close friends who look out for her but Anna finds their company a little overbearing at times. She retires early from her job with the intention of doing something a little different with her life, but soon find the daily routines quite monotonous. Anna decides to write but what she chooses to write about is something very very unusual. Anna writes about the dead. Her notes become a personal diary recounting the imagined personalities of those who have been fatally injured in bombings and such tragic events around the world. She creates characters with features, age and social standing.

‘She is striking, with a face that is powerful rather than beautiful. Her features are strong and dark, a sheen of expensive face cream smoothed over rugged bone structure. She is quick to see the worst in people but has depths of compassion that spring up occasionally, lava-like, hot, undeniable and impulsive……’

The people she writes about become part of her daily life as her thoughts spread out on paper.

Meanwhile we get a very close insight into the life and death of Caitlin, when at nineteen years of age her life was taken from her in a savage attack by her then boyfriend Ryan. Caitlin’s story is told in italics with chapters scattered throughout the book. Caitlin is an ethereal figure who appears trapped in another realm. Unable to loosen the threads to our living world, she watches her mother from a distance, watching as the lust for life is gradually sucked out of her mother.

‘Sometimes the black has a thickness like wax. With a little more substance I might leave scratches on it as I pass. I bare my imaginary teeth, pull down through, make a track, a groove. The darkness of space could be played like a record. The needle of the gods, a diamond the size of a skyscraper, so clear as to be almost invisibly black, lowered gently to read the roar of our passing’

Caitlin’s story is full of darkness and sadness. Once a very happy girl with the world at her feet, we hear her story and we hear of her demise.

Caitlin is unable to fathom fully this new world that her body now inhabits and her anguish at the cards dealt her is very evident in her words.

Twice the Speed of Dark tells the story of a mother and daughter as they flow in constant proximity to each other, but yet are unable to ever see each other. What do any of us really know what to expect in the afterlife? Lulu Allison takes her readers on a quite a spiritual journey, a journey into the unknown, ‘the realm of death.’ A mother’s love is very strong for their child through both life and death. In this novel, Lulu Allison explores this further as we witness the longing, the hope, the heartache and the pain of bereavement.

It’s very obvious from the very vivid descriptions throughout the novel that Lulu Allison uses her own personal love of the ‘visual’. As an artist she tells her story using colour, depicting places and settings with very strong imagery. At the beginning I said that I read many sections of Twice the Speed of Dark out loud. I can’t quite fathom why this was but something about the language used benefited greatly from the spoken word.

Twice the Speed of Dark is a very different novel. Lulu Allison writes with a unique style that is almost quite literary in it’s prose. It’s a very interesting concept with grief unfortunately being something we all experience at some point in our lives. An unconventional read, Twice the Speed of Dark is an accomplished debut from a new writer.

[Simon Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all have to deal with the loss of a loved one, a cornerstone to our life, but grieving is also a unique experience at two levels taking its toll on our emotions but also entailing a mental struggle with mortality and the meaning of life. Lulu Allison takes us into this dark terrain with a mother, Anna, grieving the death of her twenty year old daughter Caitlin, but she extends the reach of this remarkable book by giving Caitlin a voice from the grave and Anna the additional burden of believing that her daughter had been killed by her domineering boyfriend Ryan (even though the courts have returned a verdict of accidental manslaughter). It is a brilliant, harrowing, story of that exceptional grief: a mother's life devastated emotionally, socially, and mentally. She can neither cope with her feelings of vengeful rage nor the insistent existential questions of why and for what? And then she's subjected to a random encounter with the newly-released ogre Ryan in a local car park and she begins to unravel. One of most impressive things about this account is how intimately we witness Anna's shift from throttled frustration to a compulsion to act. The writing perfectly reflects Anna's remorseless experience - - there is very little relief in action or dialogue - - and we are left with no choice but to accompany Anna on her journey into the abyss. With flashes of Caitlin's consciousness compounding the mood of foreboding we see the story of her domestic abuse from the inside and watch, horrified, the emotional reduction of a gifted young woman to a wreckage of fear and self-loathing. Even with the action subtle and subdued the tension is excruciating - - we, as much as Anna, demand resolution. Excellent.
Edit

[Katherine Sunderland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very unusual and highly original novel. The author's artistic background is evident from the mesmerising, poetic and lyrical flow of the words which paint a vivid portrayal of grief and loss. The narrative is divided between Caitlin and her mother, between third person and first and the use of italics for Caitlin's sections enhances the dream like quality of the prose as Caitlin speaks to us from whatever unknown limbo that she finds herself inhabiting.

'To start with, when I was first dead, I was confused, caught between memory and experience, between memories from before and those since'

It's a challenge to write from the point of view of a character who is dead without falling into cliches, becoming trite or losing conviction. The reader easily buys in to the fact that Caitlin is dead yet still speaking to us. Allison makes her voice fascinating and her initial descriptions of her life suspended in a 'kaleidoscope jangle' as she tries to 'knit my story stronger for the telling' are very powerful. I was curious to see how Allison would develop and sustain this across the entire novel, yet she does so effectively. Caitlin reveals more of her relationship with Ryan and gradually the events leading up to her death show themselves. This balance between contemplation and back story work really well, particularly alongside Anna's more meditative narration.

Anna has retired and thought the 'end to the professional performance would bring relief, but the removal of the distraction of a demanding career gave her too much time for other thoughts' and her grief overwhelms her.

'cracks began to appear in the walls she had built within herself, the internal prison cell that held her grief'

The depiction of Anna is hugely emotive, powerful and haunting. Anna's frustration at how little death seems to mean in the world is triggered after the court case against Caitlin's boyfriend, where she struggles to accept the 'bland retelling' and 'indifference' towards Caitlin who is only referred to as 'a component', rather than her beautiful daughter who had her whole life ahead of her.

'death it seemed was only of interest if it excited the morbid thrill of the unusual, the lavish fetishising of television crime dramas. Distant strangers were too insignificant to warrant the care of mourning'

So Anna begins a new project. She searches the newspapers for stories of death, and whenever she finds the name or photo of someone who is killed, she writes a short paragraph about them. She calls it her 'accounting' and she wants to acknowledge these people who are not even named, numbered or considered in the reporting of accidents and terrorist attacks. These short paragraphs are shared separately within the narrative and although poignant, they are like poems or literary photographs; an effective juxtaposition between the intensity of Anna's prose and Caitlin's thoughts. I think they are also hugely thought provoking and a creative way of emphasising some of the themes raised in the novel. It also shows how powerful writing can be as a form of therapy as Anna's character seeks solace in her hobby.

There is very little, if any dialogue in the novel and so this really is book for people who love language, love character and love literature. It is accessible and it is a story about a mother and daughter, a relationship and a death, but it is more reflective than vengeful. It is sad but it is curious. It is hypnotic and although desperate and dealing with grief, loss and death, it is fluent and the reader is carried along throughout the novel, immersed in the thoughts and emotional journeys of the protagonists. The imagery is rich and there are plenty of lines worthy of note and pause, for example:

'filigree ghost-patterns of love and grief crept across Anna's hollowed insides like lichen, like salt crystals blooming on the innards of a calcified cave'

Allison's writing is interesting, unique, bold and brave. I enjoyed Twice the Speed of Dark and I was intrigued by it.

[Maximilian Hawker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twice the Speed of Dark, Lulu Allison's debut novel, is a little like a triple-layer chocolate cake: rich and dense. It is rewarding on so many levels, achingly poignant and written with a rare level of descriptive talent. For those who have suffered loss and endure grief, I imagine that they could turn to any number of passages in this book for comfort and wisdom, in much the same way a Christian turns to passages in The Bible for support.

It is not for everyone though and is far from 'light' reading. There is a strong focus on character as opposed to a runaway plot and I can imagine that some will find this frustrating and abandon it. For readers who want total immersion though, this book will offer you so much.

[Bonnye Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

GNA Twice the Speed of Dark is a very interesting story. Told in the first person of a mother and her 19 year old murdered daughter, Twice the Speed of Dark takes place in a small town outside of Oxford, England. Caitlin is killed when her live-in boyfriend Ryan loses his temper one time too many and swats her good again, but in her fall she hits her head on a piece of furniture and dies. The jury saw this sweet faced blonde fella and decided it was manslaughter, giving him jail time of just a little under ten years. Her parents, Anna and Michael, cannot help each other through the pain, and separate shortly after the trail, Michael moving on and Anna remaining in the family home. But she cannot get out the the loop of mourning and anger. Eventually she retires, which only makes matters worse as she is constantly in the place where memories haunt her every moment.

Caitlins story from the other side of life, is what holds this tale together so tightly. It is a very intriguing look at this author's imaginings of beyond the pale.

And then Ryan is released from jail, and returns to the home of his mother. Shopping for a birthday gift for her dear friend, Anna sees him, walking down the street free as a bird and laughing as he talks on his cell phone. But Caitlin is still dead. And Anna comes unglued. How can she live, with him around, constantly reminding her of the injustice of her loss?

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley' Lulu Allison, and Unbound Digital in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.
pub date Nov 24, 2017
rec Dec 4, 2017
Unbound Digital Publisher
Not available on B&N

[Mary Monro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What a brilliant writer. The topics covered in the book are extremely difficult and delicate and Lulu handles them with deft, dizzying clarity. She has the clear gaze of the dispassionate observer while her empathy allows intimate portraits of both a dysfunctional relationship and terrible heartbreak. I am completely awestruck. More please!

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a hard book to read. The writing is absolutely beautiful and the story is told from two POVs - Anna, whose nineteen year old daughter, Caitlin, was killed by an abusive boyfriend, and Caitlin herself.
I loved reading Caitlin's chapters as the consciousness that remained after her death tried to make sense of how she came to be killed, and the frustration she experienced that stemmed from her mother being so busy giving value to the lives of dead strangers that Caitlin felt blocked from her.
But Anna's chapters were a chore. The writing is fantastic, but having the minutiae of Anna's sad, empty daily life and her obsession with giving 'lives' to unnamed victims of violence or circumstance in such detail made those chapters drag. Despite, as a mother myself, empathising and understanding the depth of her desolation, I just couldn't connect emotionally with her.
I finally found the emotional connection that I needed at the end of the book, provided by another character over a cup of tea.

[Stewart Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intelligent, incisive, insightful, and with a wonderfully evocative ending that somehow (no spoilers!) manages to be both poignant and sanguine.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quality Rating: Four Stars
Enjoyment Rating: Three Stars

◆ Thank you Lulu for sending me your lovely book for review ◆

At the heart of Twice the Speed of Dark is the dark subject of domestic violence, but the black hole of Anna’s story is grief. How does one deal with the loss of a child? Where does the responsibility of blame get placed when that loss is the consequence of something darker? And why is justice not final to those involved?

The story of this novel goes in little circles like a cyclone as Anna goes through the transition of her grief. Again and again, she finds herself in the same place, thinking the exact same things. Personally, it circled a little bit much at the start for me; for about a week Anna sits sullenly and writes about the deaths of strangers across the globe. In fairness, it establishes the depths of trouble our protagonist is in.

Written almost like poetry, the exploration of grief reminded me a little bit of Margaret Atwood mixed with Jeanette Winterson: those long, visually-conjuring metaphors of idleness and isolation. By throwing a dash of magical realism into the mix, we go down the Claire Fuller route. (Overall, I wish there’d be more of the magical realism. I liked the way it played about with the timeline and created personas for people that weren’t in Anna’s immediate area of contact.)

The unhealthy cycle Anna is forcing herself through (and there are definitely times when our flawed protagonist makes active decisions to prolong her grief, because anything else feels like a betrayal, or impossible) is almost aesthetically around Anna. The vistas from the holiday she takes to escape the return of her daughter’s murderer are bright and sunny, but it’s like there’s a fog around Anna. While it’s definitely grief that is the focus of this story, I can’t help draw comparisons to other mental health issues.

But, ultimately, Twice the Speed of Dark isn’t just a fly-on-the-wall view of Anna’s grief; it’s also the transitional stages of it that she goes through. Almost ten years after her daughter’s death, things are finally ready to shift a little - sparked by the catalyst of the murderer’s return. While I can’t say that grief is an emotion I’ve yet to have experienced on any real scale, from an outsider’s perspective the book seemed to capture it pretty well. That stuck place where everything feels the same, the physical tension your body gets just from the reminder of circumstances - all things I’m pretty familiar with through depression. But what shifts this for Anna is a somewhat tried-and-tested solution, but a true one nonetheless.

I always like it when stories use the kindness of strangers to provide a different way of looking at things, or even just a quiet nudge outside of what a character would expect. Chance encounters are sometimes criticised in fiction for being just that - fictional. But anyone who’s even just travelled on their own knows that sometimes an unexpected connection with someone you’re unlikely to see again can make a world of difference. Without going too far into spoiling the book, Lulu uses this not so much to solve all of Anna’s problems, but to give her the anonymity from her life that she needs to come to terms with it.

I think it’s interesting that this book is coming out at the same time as the film Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. The universe has funny little ways of drawing comparisons itself, but the two pieces almost seem to be different forks off the same road. While I haven’t seen the film, I’m aware it’s also about a mother dealing with the murder of her daughter and the injustice of the perpetrator walking around. While Lulu’s novel takes a more meditative and magical realist stance on the subject, I have a feeling the emotional but go-getting feminism in both works will compliment each other well. If you want to prepare for the film, pick up Twice the Speed of Dark - and if not, you might want to after you’ve read this.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 3 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'Caitlin’s death caused a split, a warp that skewed Anna so she no longer fit the smooth planes of her life. She was changed by her loss. But so was everything. Grief shone a different spectrum of light; it revealed the well-formed, polished facets of normality as flawed, deceitful. The world did not respond in a way that made sense. Her daughter had been killed and no one beyond a small circle of family and close friends seemed to care.'

Mother Anna and deceased beloved daughter Caitlin are both trapped, by grief in this life, and shock in the afterlife. Cailtin’s brutal end by the hands of her ex-boyfriend is a story that must be told, even if no one can hear it. Anna finds comfort in remembering the people who die daily in war-torn countries, inventing stories for them, a keeper of their lives so they won’t be forgotten. That the sun still rises, the world forges on when others, like her, suffer ill fate of death and loss has turned her entire life upside down. That a killer can walk, that her murder can be labeled ‘accidental’ twists her insides, sours her heart as she longs for her daughter who will never see another day.

The distance of years mean nothing to Anna, the wounds of her loss, her despair are as fresh today as the were the day she lost Caitlin. She cannot let go, move on, so her life moved on without her, husband included. In another realm, Caitlin divulges the sorry end of her life, what led to the fatal blow. Just a bright, hopeful girl like any other, in love with someone she should have cut and release from her life, but a nature that clung to the best in others, listening to her tale is like witnessing someone walk a plank. Both mother and daughter abandon themselves, for different reasons. By unraveling the tale, maybe she can find release, maybe she can’t stop haunting her mother with memory and pain.

Grief becomes a torturous madness for Anna, and leads her to an unexpected confrontation that changes everything. Here, I feel, is where my heart sank hardest. It’s easier to rage when you sit only with one person’s wounds, but two mothers aching, howling with all the horror of what came to pass really moved me.

With that said, the ‘ghosts’ Anna writes about is moving and it’s the anchor that keeps her sane, present, but there were also moments it slowed too much for me. Other than that, this is a beautiful story on grief and shame, shame that in our own demise we may have had a hand. As a mother, it crushed me and as a woman, when we are young we are quick to forgive those things we shouldn’t and take on the blame for behaviors we should truly run from.

Available Now

Unbound

[Ivy Ngeow · Rating 5 out of 5]

You do not know the every day minute by minute power of a mother's love until you have read Twice the Speed of Dark by Lulu Allison. I was gripped by the beautiful, moral and liquid prose and at times moved to tears. Everybody has a mother. This is a book you cannot race through. Each line requires thought and emotion. Each line is a reflection of the emotional side of our mundane existence.

Anna is the living dead and yet she struggles because she is alive, despite of and all the more because of the tragedy that has happened. Every day she relives the nightmare and everyday she is still alive, she is still a survivor. Everyday, the love for her daughter Caitlin for whom she pulls herself together, keeps her alive.

Caitlin hits her head on a piece of furniture when her boyfriend Ryan loses his temper and she did not survive. For that he got fewer than ten years. Her parents, Anna and Michael, suffer the hardship of grief and are torn apart by the tragedy. Once they separated, Anna cannot recover from her anger and sadness because she simply has to do this alone and without support. The years pass and she retires but the family home is the source of all the memories, tiredness and futility.

One day she notices that Ryan is out of jail and he's on the phone laughin, walking scot-free. We discover if there is forgiveness and any path of recovery or redemption left for a mother is still connected by grief to her daughter whose death this villain caused.Both Anna's viewpoint and the spirit of the daughter (Caitlin) are narrative choices and devices. They are always close, in life as in death. They are both likeable, moral characters. The author has made a remarkable revelation about the power of love which will transcend tragedy, blame, anger and ultimately it has the power to heal and renew.

[JJ || This Dark Material · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not finish this book after making it about 25% of the way through. The prose is absolutely beautiful and I would strongly recommend this to any reader who prioritizes language over everything else. What I did read was a lyrical portrait of grief with some very evocative imagery...but it moved incredibly slow. This just wasn't the right match for me, unfortunately. I don't want to penalize an author just because our tastes don't align, however, so I'm taking the middle ground between no review (for not finishing) and 5 stars (for truly beautiful prose).

[Nutty · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's very hard for me to either like or dislike this book. The all encompassing prose broken only by four (short) dialogues throughout the novel made it pretty hard to follow for me. But the language of the prose made the effort worth it. Though I do not know Anna's grief, I do know grief. And the portrayal offered by the author struck a chord with me. Many chords, actually. I did not expect such a poetic encounter with death, loss and repair. It's breathtaking.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story of a mother and a murdered daughter was not something that I would normally go for. I was given the book as a suggestion during many months of lockdown.

However, Lulu has captured the despair of Anna eloquently and she wills the reader to become frustrated at Anna's inability to deal with her past. With a topic so relevant with the recent death of Sarah Everard, the last few chapters really hit home with this tragic event.

Such a simple but sad story. Worth the read!

[Tom O'Brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed and moving meditation on grief and its debilitating effects. The prose is evocative and haunting. I cared about the characters enough that from the start I was hoping for peace for both the living and the dead.

The admittedly slow pace succeeds expressing the grinding pain of loss, rather than being boring. The power of memory, revenge and injustice are other major themes.

[Louise MacAllister · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly beautiful book.

[Miles Hudson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I only read the blurb for Lulu Allison's, Twice the Speed of Dark, I almost certainly wouldn’t buy it. I like literary fiction, but stories about families and emotions are just not my thing. However, I’m really glad I read this book. It is beautifully written and compelling: the intensity of a mother's grief at the death of her daughter is so strongly imparted that one can only marvel at Lulu Allison's writing talent.

Early on, I got a strange connection to Ohran Pamuk’s ‘The New Life’. The books are not particularly similar, but both contain characters doing seemingly bizarre activities, which overcome their strangeness by being both enthralling and in character. Pamuk has a character who spends months riding Turkish minibus across the country in the hope that they will crash and that experience will enrich his life. Allison’s main character, Anna - a mother grieving the death of her daughter at the hands of an abusive partner - writes little scene vignettes about unknown dead people. Anyone reported killed on the news is given new life as an imagined character that Anna writes about in a notebook. These elements are a study in people-watching: I wondered if Allison spent hours in coffee shop windows writing these characters from real people-watching.

Both imagery and technical wordplay are very strong in this book. Indeed, it included the most brilliant use of the word ‘husbandry’ I have ever come across; and the excellent use of ‘mummify’ also brought a smile to my brain. As many reviewers have said of Twice the Speed of Dark, the prose is genuinely lyrical.

The time we spend with Anna is occasionally interrupted with input from the disembodied spirit of her daughter. Caitlin is stuck in some sort of purgatory, still not understanding or even totally familiar (after ten Earth years) with her non-corporeal situation. Anna’s story takes us through the mundanity of coping, or not, with her ongoing grief, heightened by the recent prison release of her daughter’s killer, Ryan. We see her struggle with friendships, with the ease of alcohol as support, with the dark hatred she has for Ryan, and with the difficulty of moving on and finding purpose for the future. The final conclusion is interesting, and it's neither of the two possible endings I was building up to in my mind. No spoilers - read it and find out!

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

From reviews I’d read around publication time, I didn’t expect this book to be an easy read. And for a whole range of reasons, both style and subject matter, it really wasn’t. But what I hadn’t been prepared for was the exquisite beauty of the writing. I’ll admit that for the first few pages I really thought it might not be for me – I like my reading to be fairly straight-forward with a clear story arc and a pace to the narrative, and I felt I might struggle. But once I’d settled and felt more comfortable, the writing entirely won me over. There’s a poetry throughout – real beauty, every word carefully chosen, every small moment captured in detail, perfectly described with the eye of an artist, the whole infused with an emotional depth I found quite stunning. As a portrait of grief that you feel with your heart, this book is an absolute triumph – a book to read slowly, to linger over the meaning, to turn back the pages and reread passages that have caught your imagination.

This isn’t a book that everyone will love, and you might not like it at all if you don’t like a deep and minute exploration of thoughts and feelings, some exceptionally painful. But this book is a great deal more than an examination of misery. There were elements of the story telling I very much enjoyed. The two viewpoints – the grieving mother, and the voice of her dead daughter, with the slow reveal of the events that led up to her death, a moving story of jealousy, obsession and domestic violence – are superbly handled, and the approach highly original. I loved Anna’s acts of love for strangers, the cataloguing of lives lost and recorded only as numbers in small newspaper columns – and her notebook with the cover the colour of bluebells. Anna’s pain is something you really feel – the pivotal encounter at the book’s centre is unforgettable, visceral in its impact. And then there’s her escape and her attempts to find some freedom and connection – joy and agony, mixed together in the moments, and her encounters with others totally engrossing and very moving.

I’m so glad I read this book – an unforgettable experience, and a book I’ll continue to think about in those quiet moments. Just wonderful.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna’s daughter Catlin was killed by her boyfriend who in a heated argument that became physical ended up resulting in her death and his incarceration for manslaughter. He received a sentence of 10 years. Now, neither women can move on, Anna in this life and Catlin in the afterlife, both trapped by the events of that night.

The story is told by both Anna and her daughter which gives gives the plot depth as well as twice the emotions!

For Anna life stopped on that day and grief threatens to pull her under, a grief that knows no bounds. How can life carry on without Catlin in it? How can the world keep turning? How can time keep ticking by when all she wants is for it to stop. She is angry at the world, at all those people that are carrying on with life as if nothing has happened. Her daughter was murdered, why does no one else seem to care? How can her death be ruled as an accident, not murder but manslaughter? The only coping strategy Anna finds is in writing about other peoples deaths, people from the news, strangers, people she has never met, giving them names and faces, giving them a voice to tell their tales, ones that she imagines for them.

Catlin’s tale is one of young love, of forgiving things that she never should have, of being blinded by that love as she tells her story, the story of how she came to be telling her tale from belong the grave. And maybe, just maybe, by telling her tale will finally let her move on. But fate has not finished with them yet as Anna comes face to face with Ryan, her daughters killer after he is released from prison.

The whole book is written very lyrical, using the English language at its full potential. It is probably one of the most emotionally charged books that I have ever read. Heartbreaking at times, others you could feel some of the anger burning the pages, but somewhat comforting as well at times. You can’t help but put yourself in Anna’s shoes and it just doesn’t bear thinking about, I even ended up going into my daughters bedroom to make sure she was ok!

Grab a copy now to find out for yourself just how good and heartwarming this book is for yourself.

[Corinna Edwards-Colledge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Lulu at a literature event during the Brighton festival as we both had stalls there promoting our books. We got chatting and decided to do a book swap. I gave her Return of the Morrigan, and she gave me Twice the Speed of Dark. I'd say about one book in every ten I read stays with me, and Twice the Speed of Dark is one of them. It wasn't an easy or simple read, there is no dialogue, for example, until page 55; but it is absolutely worth investing in. My only tiny observation is that occasionally she uses two descriptive elements where one will do and this can slow down the pace - I only notice this as it is also something I can be prone to! Overall the prose is wonderfully weighted, poetic and profound, and the story - despite its very personal theme - is also a page turner, particularly the description of the dead daughter's relationship with her boyfriend as it descends slowly, but inevitably into violence. As someone who has lost someone very important to them, as well as been witness to domestic violence (though not to me personally) I thought Lulu's description of both were deeply authentic and sensitively written. As I read I kept thinking how different Lulu's writing style was to mine, and kept trying to decide on what that was. Then about half way through the book it occurred to me: when I write, I am picturing the story unfolding ahead of me like a film, and I write what I see - Lulu, I suspect, has the story play through her mind almost entirely through how her characters are feeling (or repressing what they are feeling!) and so her style is deeply internal. I am not advocating one style over another, it was just a fascinating realisation to make, and shows how diverse the craft of writing is! A wonderful story, wonderfully told, and deeply moving. So glad we did our swap!

[Eli Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poetic and visually arresting book, you can feel the elegant imagination on every page. The voice of the daughter Caitlin was particularly original; she speaks from the other side, and the way Allison describes this place it truly feels, ‘other’. The weaving of the cosmos into Caitlin’s journey was a creative touch which I’m more than a little jealous I didn’t think of. Allison has a lovely way with words and this literary novel is brimming with concepts and insight. Not an easy beach read, but sometimes you need to stretch your mind to keep it limber.