Relative Stranger: A Life After Death

'On the twenty-seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn't know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn't know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed.' "Relative Stranger" is the riveting story of Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister, whom she had not seen for the last twelve years of her life. An explicit account of the devastation that schizophrenia can visit upon a person and their family, it will leave no reader unaffected. Asking more questions than it answers, "Relative Stranger" offers a profound and uncompromising challenge to the ways in which we think about one another. Perhaps most compelling is the author's internal journey as she faces head-on her sister's illness and extraordinary alter ego. As Loudon dissects our definitions of sanity and identity, and examines our assumptions about familial responsibility, she challenges everything we believe about what it means to love, to lose, to die, to live and, above all, to belong. "Relative Stranger" is Mary Loudon's most provocative and moving book to date. It is sure to be one of the most talked about and acclaimed books published in the UK next year.