The fifth book from Chloe Hooper, an accomplished author of fiction and nonfiction, is in part a bedtime story told across many nights to her two sons, and in part a meditation on how stories – ancient and modern – might sustain or fail us during dark times.
In 2019 Hooper was thrust into a whorl of uncertainty about how and what to tell her children about their father’s very likely terminal leukaemia. Their father is Don Watson, historian, biographer, speech writer and essayist. Out of the blue, he’d been diagnosed with a rare and trenchant form of his disease.
