Before the devastating ‘loss of her marbles’, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously – from Trollope to Woolf, Tennyson to Foucault – swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and of wildlife that will form his character and his career. In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son – Royle’s younger brother – to cancer in his twenties. At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on the climate crisis and ‘mother nature’, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself.