All That Is Fragile - Hardcover

by Vanessa Branson (Author)

All that is Fragile is an immersive tale that takes Kate from world-weary curator running from a long hidden family secret to the point of resolution via reliving memories from seminal months spent in Berlin to meeting a man of nature on a Scottish island. The novel investigates questions of family loyalty, the nature of cults and the role of the arts and critical thinking.

Kate is a forty-one year old Tate curator who has built a life in constant motion, keeping loneliness at bay through sheer momentum. When her son leaves for his gap year, the house falls quiet, and the independence she has always prized starts to feel like something closer to abandonment. A traumatic event sends her tightly managed world spinning, and an unexpected retreat to a remote Scottish island opens up space she has never allowed herself: for refuge, for reckoning, for love.

For readers of The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller and Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, All That Is Fragile is an immersive novel of self-discovery and, at its heart, a love story. Spanning Scotland, London, Berlin, Kerala and Riyadh, and set against two seismic world events, it interlaces Kate's inner unravelling with the pressures of the wider world - power and bias in the art market, the reach of cancel culture, and the global politics of the Middle East.

All That Is Fragile asks what remains when the things we rely on to hold ourselves together - status, routine, other people's certainty - fall away, and what, if anything, is left standing.