Why, oh why?

In my many years as a judge for the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, I have been constantly surprised by the high proportion of books that deal with the subject of adoption. It is usually a melancholy story of young people who, as their 18th birthdays approach, become obsessed with the need to meet their natural parents, only eventually to find themselves being entertained by families with which they have nothing in common; of couples who suddenly discover that the children that they had come to regard as their own have now abruptly given precedence in their affections to total strangers; and of women who, having made the terrible sacrifice of surrendering a child, now only agree with extreme reluctance to have their past shame, guilt and anguish revived for them.

Adoption is also the theme of this dark and painful novel, in which, in a feat of remarkable ventriloquism, a 52-year-old novelist adopts the voice of a young girl frenetically asking the same question over and over again: ‘Why was I given up?’

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To escape from this question, Lily has sought refuge in the dub reggae venues of the north of England and the drugs so easily available at them. To one particular small and still obscure band, Ozymandias, she has become a groupie, having developed a crush on its enigmatic lead female singer. From recreational drugs like ‘’shrooms’ (mushrooms) and skunk weed she has moved on to heroin and, even worse, to ayahuasco, a potent and highly perilous South American substance that produces in her such violent alterations of consciousness that she ends up in a psychiatric ward. It is only then that her adoptive parents — her mother efficient but chilly, her father a boyish figure, more older brother than responsible pater familias — seem at last to be concerned about the way in which constant tripping is destroying her sanity.