SOURCE: Broughton, Trev. “Edible Imagery.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4725 (22 October 1993): 21.

In the following review, Broughton argues that the short stories collected in During Mother's Absence are unified by the overarching theme of mother-daughter relationships and provide “an excellent introduction to the central themes of Roberts's fiction.”

These nine stories [in During Mother's Absence,] provide an excellent introduction to many of Michèle Roberts's preoccupations over the past five years: her compassion for weakness; her warm and witty nostalgia for a childhood spent between suburban England and rural France; her robustly unsentimental fascination for mystical experience and la vie religieuse; her unflinching exploration of the way in which taboos—cancer, childhood sexuality, incest—prey on consciousness. They also show her considerable strengths, above all, her instinct for what makes the forbidden fruity.

Important influences—Toni Morrison's majestic Beloved, the sensual punning and mischief of Colette's Claudine stories—are near...