About the book

The Absolutes by Kate Potter His wife is dead.

His beloved daughter has been lost to a dangerous cult.

And now time is running out to rebuild their relationship. Haunted by his failings as a son, a husband and, most of all, as a father, he is desperate to try and make things right before it’s too late.

Told through fragments of memory The Absolutes captures the essence of hope in the face of loss as one man struggles to come to terms with his past.

What I learned

The Absolutes is beautifully written, told through fragments of the unnamed protagonist’s memory. Kate Potter’s writing makes you savour each piece of the book, re-reading passages to enjoy them all over again. The language is magical, broken into morsels that are just enough to satisfy, acting as plot points, dazzling imagery and devastating emotional bombs.

And the story is gripping – even if it’s told in a non-traditional way. It starts with the tragic suicide of Effie’s mum, an event that shatters any semblance of normality in this small family unit; the effects echoing down the years and throwing the characters far from their former lives. In the following years, we see them trying to make sense of the world and making choices that tragically take them even further from one another. You want to reach into the book and help them. It’s a story of missed chances, poor communication things left unsaid; of how deep grief can isolate people from one another.

The imagery throughout is haunting – from the suicide on a motorway bridge to the eerie cult on the Isle of Man that Effie finds herself drawn to; the heron-like sinister leader and the dreams that haunt the protagonist throughout. The end of the book is heartbreaking, beautifully-written and stays in the memory a long time.

As your letters progressed through the years, you used more and more jargon. Those strange, nonsensical compound phrases. It seemed that you were redefining language into disassembled, maimed forms that even I couldn’t repair or explain. Letter crenulations beaten smooth to mean nothing.