In Fiona’s chapter, how does the woman in the wheelchair connect with Fiona’s grandmother?
I have gathered, from many readers, that this chapter, deliberately the middle one out of seven, is the most challenging. I think this is partly because Fiona, Hannah’s older granddaughter, is the only character who tries hard not to think about the tragedies of Hannah’s life, so that Hannah is more marginal to her thoughts. Yet Fiona’s effort to live a safe, happy life, self-contained and insular, can’t succeed in any simple way. The thought of Hannah accompanies her as a shadow, in the same way that Hannah’s sister Emma, who perished at the camp of Drancy in 1943, comes to Fiona in the form of a small ghost at her elbow. Even when Fiona is attempting simply to find a babysitter for her baby Seamus, she bumps into such shadows in the form of Zoe, a woman who longs for something she can’t have, at least not in the form she wishes: a baby to love and nurture each day, whether she’s in a wheelchair or not. Zoe’s yearning confronts Fiona with her own buried fears and her knowledge that li
