As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side.
A woman self-destructs with alcohol and men who are always around to push her further down. Despite occasional sobriety, she loses two of her children who escape her and live their own lives as far away as they can, while the third, a young boy, stands by her till the day she dies. His brother comes back to arrange the cremation; council funding doesn't stretch to a burial, and there seem to be no sad faces at the funeral after which the boy, by then a teenager who being gay has never quite fit in anywhere, is left to fend for himself though, thankfully, he does at least seem to have found friendship in the person of a girl about his age. It's a bleak novel but it's also realistic, and the hope it offers doesn't feel false.