The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne

Freya North

‘I grew up amongst the living and the dead and there was companionship to be found with both.’

LIVING next door to a cemetery in a very ordinary street in an equally unremarkable English garden city doesn’t bother only child Eadie Browne in the least... in fact, she rather likes her ‘quiet neighbours’ and considers many of them to be her friends.

But a very different world awaits the very unwordly Eadie outside the order and calm of her ‘spick-and-span’ bedroom and her strange graveyard playground. Will the heady freedoms of life beyond 41 Yew Lane make or break this strange and highly imaginative little girl?

Freya North (pictured below), one of the UK’s best-loved authors of contemporary domestic dramas like the much-acclaimed Little Wing, homes in on her own experiences in this memorable coming-of-age story about growing up and finding yourself, even when the past won’t let you go. Billed as a powerful love letter to youth, The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne was born out of the departure of North’s eldest child to university, an event that prompted her to reflect on her own ‘seismic’ days at Manchester University.

The result was a ‘nostalgic and cathartic’ experience that inspired this exquisitely poignant, tender, life-affirming, and yet darkly funny rites-of-passage tale, and convinced North that the past is truly a foreign country where, without doubt, she did things differently.

It’s 1976 and six-year-old Eadie Browne is an odd child living with her eccentric parents in Parkwin Garden City. Her mum and dad like ‘staying in’ while young Eadie loves being outside, preferably in the next door graveyard, a place where she feels at home with the dead, and conversely calls it her ‘Living Room.’

Eadie’s schooldays are marred by the unwanted attention of the class bully but she muddles through and has found both protection and loyalty from her two best friends, quiet and kind Josh Albert, and tall, ultra-organised, beautiful and popular Celeste Walker. Arriving in Manchester as a student in the late 1980s, Eadie confronts a busy, gritty, noisy metropolis, a far

cry from the small Garden City she’s left behind. Soon enough she is enjoying experiences she could never have imagined... eating curry from takeaways, drinking pints of beer and crowding into the famous Haçienda nightclub.

Eadie is seduced by it all, she can be who she wants to be, do as she pleases, and no one back home needs to know. But as Manchester embraces the dizzying, colourful euphoria of Rave counterculture, Eadie is happy to be swept along, blithely ignoring danger and reality. Until, one night, her past comes hurtling at her with consequences which will continue into her adult life.

Fast forward to 1999, as the new Millennium beckons, and we find Eadie turning thirty with a marriage in tatters and travelling back to where she once lived for a funeral she can’t quite comprehend. As she journeys with her husband from the North to the South, from the present to the past, Eadie contemplates all that was then... and all that is now.

Razor-sharp dialogue and breathtakingly authentic characterisation is what North does best and the wild, weirdly imaginative and wonderful Eadie is undoubtedly the shining star of this foray into those pivotal and often painful years between childhood and adulthood. Her progression from the bullied class outsider through the whole gamut of emotions that mark out the turbulent teenage years, and onwards to the nervous excitement and hedonistic joys of university freedom, and the challenges of work and more mature relationships, are as close to real life as the pages of a book can transport you.

Weaving between past and present, readers wait with bated breath as Eadie joins the inevitable rollercoaster of growing up, observing her triumphs and disasters, the making of friendships that will shape her future, and recognising the turning points that have brought her to the journey she is making now on the eve of her thirtieth birthday. Written straight from the heart, deeply rooted in time and place, and with a stunning depth of emotional insight and hindsight, The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne is arguably North’s best novel yet.
(Welbeck, hardback, £16.99)