At one point in Fiona Williams’s accomplished debut novel, an elderly lady tells 10-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at sea, “to weigh down them clipper ships sent to collect sugar from the Caribbean … yes, where your nana and grandad came from”. The symbolism could not be more explicit: that which appears damaged can, from a different perspective, offer stability.
The House of Broken Bricks follows the Hembry family through a calendar year during which the fractures in their domestic life seem beyond repair. Tessa, London-born daughter of Jamaican parents, feels ground down by the often unwitting microaggressions she experiences as the only person of colour in their small Somerset village. Her husband, Richard, hides in his shed, secretly drinking as his business struggles. Max and Sonny, their non-identical “rainbow twins”, are left to narrate the slow implosion of their parents’ marriage, while navigating their own complex relationship with identity. “I am black. I think,” says white-presenting Max, when the boys at school insist that he and Sonny can’t be twins, and strangers assume his mother is his nanny.
