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*** SHORTLISTED for the 2021 COSTA BOOK AWARDS: BIOGRAPHY, PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE and the JHALAK PRIZE ***
‘Moving, engrossing, elegantly written’ Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
When Arifa Akbar discovered that her sister had fallen seriously ill, she assumed there would be a brief spell in hospital and then she’d be home. It was not until the day before she died that the family discovered she was suffering from tuberculosis.
On a mission to unearth family secrets and finally understand her sister, Arifa takes us to Rome to haunt the places Keats and her sister had explored, to her grandparent’s house in Pakistan, to her sister’s hospital bedside in Hampstead and back to the London of the seventies when her family arrived, poor, homeless and hungry.
Consumed is an eloquent and moving exploration of sisterhood, grief and the redemptive power of art.
