Not the Sky

Gail Ashton’s Not the Sky: a memoir up-ends a West Midlands working-class childhood and chaotic family to re-imagine the present.

From the outside lavvy to backyards and gardens galore, Ashton confronts long-held secrets, ghosts, and converses with the dead. Meet a dying mother demanding a will and a prize-winning rose bowl; the estranged father with an email, rescued football boots and two glasses of Asti Spumante; the great-aunt transformed into a skylark; the sister and a DNA kit; an abusive grandfather and a failed guard dog. Meet inanimate objects, animals and miscarried babies.

By turns comic, heartbreaking and life-affirming, this book plays with genre to question notions of memory and truth.

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