Historical novel set around LONDON and SOUTHERN ENGLAND 16th Century
Novel set in BELFAST and LONDON
25th June 2026
Into The Wreck by Susannah Dickey, novel set in BELFAST and LONDON.
Exploring the complexities of family relationships
Susannah Dickey’s Into the Wreck is an unsettling, intricately structured novel that intertwines motherhood, memory and the shadows of grief. The prose can sometimes come across as pretentious and far too experimental but, at its core lies something far more intimate and emotionally resonant: the fraught, complicated relationship between a mother and her children.
Set between a remote suburb of Belfast and London, the novel unfolds across layered timelines and takes the story and feelings of each of Yvonne’s children in turn. Starting with Gemma, who is undergoing her own teenage sexual revolution and all the uncertainties that brings, her story weaves together fragments of testimony, recollection and reinterpretation.
We then move on to Anna, who rebelled against her mother’s authoritarianism at an early age and finally flew the nest to make her own way in life. But the suicide of her father has brought her back to the family home and she must confront all her demons and her fraught relationship with her mother and siblings.
Yvonne, who is a renowned oncologist in her own right, is struggling with her own demons – a mother who didn’t feel her worthy. She is not easily categorised. She is not overtly monstrous, nor is she a figure of simple sympathy. Instead, she is rendered with a subtlety that captures the contradictions of motherhood—her care sits uncomfortably alongside emotional distance; her authority shades into control; her silence becomes a form of power. She has brought all that emotional distance into her relationship with her own children and, in a further twist, is yet to discover further secrets about her husband and her “sister”, Amy.
At the centre of the novel is a fractured family dynamic between a mother and her children, shaped by a tragedy that is gradually revealed rather than explicitly explained. Dickey resists straightforward storytelling, instead presenting multiple versions of events, allowing readers to feel the disorientation and instability that exists within the family itself. This ambiguity mirrors the children’s attempts to make sense of their mother: a figure who is at once present and unknowable, defined as much by what she withholds as by what she reveals.
Dickey offers no resolution or catharsis. The relationship between mother and daughters, in particular, remains, to the end, unresolved – mainly because some family dynamics cannot be neatly untangled. The significance of the shipwreck that seems to hold the story together is a bit nebulous but could be seen to be a metaphor for the disjointed family relationships.
The “wreck” is not only the past event that haunts the family but the emotional architecture built around it—the fragments of truth, silence and reinterpretation that the daughters must navigate. In this sense, the book charts a psychological journey rather than a physical one, asking what it means to revisit painful histories and whether understanding is ever truly possible.
Readers will be drawn to the formal literary style, complex portrayals of motherhood, and stories that explore the enduring impact of family relationships across generations.
Val for the TripFiction Team
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