Beautifully written, tightly structured, One Hundred Letters Home is as profoundly moving as it is intelligent and playful. There is the experience here of time’s shifting nature, the way memory, need and desire work across the layers of narrative that shape a life, told, untold, remembered, misremembered and forgotten.

Memory’s work rolls through Aitken’s perfectly measured storytelling, vivid and mesmerising in its detail, in the detours and return, in a work that is as aware socially and politically, as it is compassionate and vulnerable. This is a rare work of memoir, expansive in its cultural scope, in the precision of detail and acceptance of the failures of memory, self and family, common to all of us in their variation.

Between laughter and tears, the underlying emotional grit and relentlessness of One Hundred Letters Home shifts things, changes you, as Aitken calls to account the past’s ongoing presence in how we are to ourselves and each other.