My Real Children by Jo Walton
The day Mark called, Patricia Cowan's world split in two.
The phone call.
His question.
Her answer.
A single word.
`Yes.'
`No.'
It is 2015 and Patricia Cowan is very old. `Confused today' read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War - those things are solid in her memory. Then that phone call and...her memory splits in two.
She was Trish, a housewife and mother of four.
She was Pat, a successful travel writer and mother of three.
She remembers living her life as both women, so very clearly. Which memory is real - or are both just tricks of time and light?
My Real Children is the story of both of Patricia Cowan's lives - each with its loves and losses, sorrows and triumphs, its possible consequences. It is a novel about how every life means the entire world.