As Zoe was created in her mother’s womb, Sarajevo’s library was set on fire. In the weeks that followed, the citizens of that city came out into their gardens to find pages of books floating down from the sky, landing in plum trees, fluttering along streets, the fortune of a culture blown apart by their neighbours’ guns—

JUDGE: What does this mean? She felt, what, that her priorities had narrowed?

ALICE: She’d been very prudent as a young woman. Too prudent to get pregnant without thinking and planning. There’d been a man she had loved in the city the Serbs were laying siege to. And here she was, in England of all places, gardening, caught up in a petty domestic drama. The house, those sons: parasites on her time and energy. She wanted to be full of something new, like Nina; absorbed; without caution. [Pause] During the war in Bosnia she didn’t do anything, beyond giving money. She didn’t offer refuge. It astonished her later.

Zoe was born in Harcourt Hospital; a straightforward birth, a ten-hour labour, during a night of heavy rain. Nina’s exertions were almost rhythmic, in the way they chimed with the crashing of the thunder and the crack of lightning across the labour-room wall.

Sebastian missed the birth entirely. He had been in the islands in the week leading up to the due date, so Eva was completely dumbfounded when he arrived in the kitchen one morning and asked if she could drive him to the airport. She gathered from Henry that there was a totally delicious girl he was seeing from college; she lived in a castle in Northumberland; it was her twenty-first. Fatboy Slim, whoever he was, had been booked to play.

JUDGE: Your mother stood in for you, as it were, in your daughter’s life, from the beginning?

SEBASTIAN: [Clears throat] I believe she did, yes.