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.
Early in the book, it becomes apparent that the family are reeling from a crisis weightier than the ignorance of a small community. The revelation, when it comes, is presented less as a dramatic twist than a gentle confirmation of what the reader already suspects. Williams’s interest here is in the nature of belonging, and the ways in which our greater and lesser griefs are absorbed into the cyclical rhythms of the natural world. A connection with the land, expressed through gardening and the evocative names of plants, is common to both the Jamaican and West Country sides of the family. “Don’t worry, your roots will sustain you,” Sonny says, echoing his grandmother.
The House of Broken Bricks is a tender and powerful novel, all the more profound for its apparent simplicity, and establishes Williams as an exciting and original new voice.
The House of Broken Bricks by Fiona Williams is published by Faber (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
