Relative Stranger : A Sister's Story

On the twenty-seventh of January 2001, while I was skiing fast down a mountain in France, my sister, Catherine, was dying slowly in England; in a hospital I didn't know she had been admitted to, from a cancer I didn't know she had, under an identity I had no idea existed.

Relative Stranger is the riveting story of Mary Loudon's search for her dead sister, whom she had not seen for the last twelve years of her life, and a haunting account of the devastation that schizophrenia can visit upon a person and their family. Asking more questions than it answers, Relative Stranger recounts Mary's compelling internal journey as she faces head-on her sister's illness and the discovery of her extraordinary alter-ego.

As she examines our notions of sanity, identity and familial responsibility, she challenges everything we believe about what it means to love, to die, to live and, above all, to belong.

Praise for Relative Stranger:

'Relative Stranger is a truly extraordinary book, not just the subject matter and the wonderful vitality, yet control, of the style, but also the way Mary Loudon has structured it, the sheer management of all this difficult and wild and elusive material. And she manages to be so candid without once tipping over into victim speak. I was so impressed.'

Joanna Trollope

'Remarkable and very affecting, and a comfort too. Mary Loudon sees through the dark of insanity to the light of understanding.'

Fay Weldon

'Written with great flair, clarity, imaginative intensity, and extraordinary confidence and style. Honest and unvarnished and without mawkishness of any kind. Convincing, gripping and moving, it will deserve to be a triumph.'

Jonathan Dimbleby