Next of Kin by Joanne Trollope

This one is a bit darker than the rest of her books. Death, resultant grief, the myriad ways people handle grief and then the resultant period which follows intense grieving. A bit of an eye opener for me personally anyway. We have the opening scene with the death of Caro, someone who came from America twenty years ago and who never quite adapted to the vagaries of hard farm life and with her death releases a whole lot of intense emotion which seemed to have been bottled up within her family and extended family for decades. When her death is followed by the violent death of her brother in law - the reasons for his depression under estimated and unknown by his own family - everyone is not brought closer together which should be the case but rather further divided into their own little coccoons of not knowing what they should have done, what they did not do right and generally being more miserable than they were before. Every character was unique, every character we can read in people within our own family, the situations are similar and we wonder whether we would behave like this. The story gets you questioning oneself, ones ethics and morals and whether we are found wanting. A really profound novel. A book I picked up from a free library which was my first free library find!