Relative Stranger

Relative Stranger is the riveting story of Mary Loudon’s search for her dead sister, whom she had not seen for the last twelve years of her life. A heartrending account of the devastation that schizophrenia can visit upon a person and a family, it will leave no reader unaffected.

Relative Stranger offers a profound and uncompromising challenge to the ways in which we think about one another. Perhaps most compelling of all is the author’s internal journey as she faces head-on her sister’s illness. As Loudon dissects our definitions of sanity and identity and unpicks our assumptions about familial responsibility, she challenges everything we believe about what it means to love, to lose, to die, to live and above all, to belong.

Relative Stranger is Mary Loudon’s most provocative, incisive and moving book yet.