The Ladder

Gary looks in his mirror in the morning and sees only blood. Drink, perhaps, but maybe more than that. Undertakers come to take away his wife Kim. He has already dealt with bereavement once when they lost their daughter Adrianna.

He settles on a remote Scottish island, living the life of a recluse and gives out a false name for himself, though the locals keep probing.

The story goes back and forth between the past and the present, between the husband and the wife. Gary and Kim are very different personalities. She is no-nonsense, energetic, dislikes ‘fuss’, loves colour. He is more contemplative, worries. They experience the conception, birth and death of Adrianna differently. As Kim declines, her suffering punctuated with ‘intervals of happiness’, they approach her sickness and her impending death from different angles.

He decides to build a memorial to her, somewhere he can see it every day. He buys a ladder and paints it in 46 different colours, in her honour, and begs for her forgiveness. But the monument elicits questions from the islanders which Gary would rather not deal with.

This is a sober account of grown-up, married love—a story about how a loving couple learn to cope with the unthinkable. Waterhouse writes beautifully about grief and the complex emotions that come with bereavement. Yet the story is not all tears.

The construction of the memorial and daily life in the Scottish village yank Gary out of his sadness. Shopkeeper Angus, fisherman Struan and a chance visitor from his old life challenge his imposed seclusion. The balance between the heart-rending understanding of Gary's and Kim's emotions and the plot around the ladder and the change it provokes in Gary is brilliant.

A heart-rending understanding of bereavement spiced up with a twisty plot.

I received an ARC from the author.