Natalia

Natalia is the book's narrator, and the protagonist in the most present day of its three plot lines. While her age is never explicitly defined, there is the sense that she is in her early to mid thirties. She is strong willed and determined, compassionate and outspoken, and particularly interested in the welfare of children. She also has the idiosyncratic habit of wearing her white doctor's coat at all times, its suggestion of both identity and status apparently important to her. She is devoted to her grandfather in both life and death, in spite of their relationship having several significant downs as well as many, equally significant, ups. Most of these ups, the narrative indicates, involve the sharing of important intimacies - specifically, her grandfather's sharing of intimacies with her, stories and secrets that, it seems, he has shared with no-one else, not even his wife. The sharing...