A taut, ground-breaking new novel about a writer's relationship with her larger-than-life mother - and about the very nature of writing.

Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself recalling all that made her complicated mother extraordinary.

Even though the woman, a writer, wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, she must decide whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal.