It is the narrator’s daughter who asks her mother to write a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. She’ll be lucky! The narrator is called Ella Camposanto but that’s fairly irrelevant since she’s obviously the writer, Valeria Luiselli and, of course, both have daughters, the one in the novel is called Manuela.

The narrator is escaping from a difficult divorce and a series of book tours so she disappears with her daughter to Catania in Sicily and gives us a journal of events, sometimes trivial and sometimes less so. They live in a borrowed house, loaned by a boyfriend of the narrator’s who turns out to be a typical man. The relationship does not end well and mother and daughter go off to seek the village where the mother’s grandmother came from.

Apart from the road trip, this is where the book becomes interesting. There are four generations of women intertwined and the women’s stories provide substance to the narrative along with a Roman tile depicting the shape shifting sea-God, Proteus which, ultimately, Manuela wants to see returned to the place where her great-grandmother originally collected it.

There’s a surprise at the end of the novel where the daughter picks up the story and, in a way, provides a clearer narrative of what happened without the musings and distractions of her mother. There are also some Polaroid photos documenting the trip, but equally as blurry as the events, and some postcards which the daughter writes to her grandmother.

And, finally, because this is Sicily, Mount Etna is rumbling away in the background and there are a large number of displaced refugees to parallel the displacement of the author.

Described like this, you would think this book is unreadable but actually it’s enjoyable and quite easy to become immersed in the events and reflections – even the classical references. You come away with this picture of strong family women holding the world together without reward, and not just in their lives but in lives stretching back to classical times. Some people will think it is too clever by half with a bit of the Emperor’s new clothes about it but don’t worry about whether it is fiction or not, just enjoy the ride.