The Woman Who Drew Buildings by Wendy Robertson (Headline, £19.99) (From The Northern Echo)

The Woman Who Drew Buildings by Wendy Robertson (Headline, £19.99)

11:58am Saturday 19th September 2009 in Reviews By Sharon Griffiths

FUNNY things, families – and how they work, whatever shape and size they come in.

Marie Matheve is not your typical mother. An architectural illustrator travelling all over the world drawing buildings, she is so anxious not to crowd Adam, her only son, that from a very early age she gives him almost too much space. They seem to hardly see or need each other at all. But after years apart – and a traumatic period in his life – Adam needs to find Marie again, but when he arrives at her home in Durham finds her seriously ill after a fall.

As she lies in a coma, he reads to her from her old notebooks, including her visit to Poland at a time of turmoil and change, when revolution was in the air, the Communist regime was losing its grip, families clung together and his self-contained mother in a strange land at a strange time became caught up in a short, but intoxicatingly sweet love affair.

In the hospital room, both mother and son are adrift in their different ways and need each other. But they need to know each other too. First of all there are secrets to be explained, the past to be faced and accepted.

Only then can they both move on, stronger, happier.

Once again, Bishop Auckland author Wendy Robertson has conjured up a wonderful sense of time and place – you could really feel yourself to be in Poland in the Eighties, in the cold and the queues and the tiny crowded flats. Above all, there is a cast of vivid and intriguing characters.

All of them, even the “extras”, leap fully-rounded from the page.

■ As part of the Durham Book Festival, Wendy will be on a panel discussing the benefits of original writing for women in prison, on October 27, at the Gala Theatre, Durham. bookfestival.org.uk