Clara’s Daughter

From the author of Magda, an incisive dissection of matriarchal power-play set in the leafy suburbs of North London. Ziervogel evokes the age-old mother-daughter struggle - cast in contemporary role anxieties. Is Michele destined to be mother, wife, high-powered business woman or merely 'Clara's Daughter'? A moving read for our times. -- Morag Charlwood, Shoreham Wordfest A taut and compelling drama about the place of the elderly in family life and about how, in one way or another, it's the destiny of the old to be hidden away. It's also about how much a marriage can take, and what it eventually boils down to - clothes in bin liners. I enjoyed Clara's Daughter hugely; in this novella length story Meike Ziervogel has achieved a lot with, relatively speaking, a little. Reading it was like watching a very good play. -- Isabel Wolff, Sunday Times bestselling author of 'Ghostwritten' A quietly devastating book about the disintegration of a marriage. Moving the mother into the basement and then having the backwards and forwards structure creating a sense of the will-she-won't-she move in and detonate like a bomb down there or merely sit and rot like a huge dark fish while the marriage falls apart above is a stroke of genius. -- Natalie Young, author of 'Season to Taste' Meike Ziervogel is becoming one of the most interesting figures in the contemporary British and European world, not just because she is a publisher of imagination and daring, but a writer of grace, forensic precision, and power. Rarely has someone given so much from sheer enthusiasm, and talent, and been so worth watching. -- Nicholas Lezard

Michele is a successful business woman with a troubled private life. When she moves her elderly mother, Clara, into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into the night. Eventually, Clara – the controlling matriarch – finds a way to release her daughter. But can Michele release herself?

Michele is a successful business woman with a troubled private life. She has a high-powered job, a family, a husband, yet she is defined by a term of possession: she is ‘Clara’s daughter’. Nameless. When Michele moves her mother into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into the night. Michele increasingly hides away upstairs, as Clara weaves her conspiracies beneath.

Clara’s Daughter begins in terraced houses and city parks of North London but develops, through sharp-edged monologues and surreal visions, into a primeval stand-off between mother and daughter. Eventually, Clara – the controlling matriarch – finds a way to release her daughter. But can Michele release herself?

Meike Ziervogel is a master of suspenseful storytelling. In Clara’s clandestine power games and Michele’s increasingly fraught dealings with both her mother and her own highly-strung sister, Hilary, there emerges a chilling, yet poignant family tableau. Devastating in its psychological insights, Clara’s Daughter reveals unnerving truths about relationship anxieties on many levels, which emerge not only from Ziervogel’s elegant, succinct descriptions, but build steadily from the tense, silent spaces between the unfolding of main events. A divinely-crafted, almost cinematic novella, Clara’s Daughter is at once startling, moving and intensely enduring.