Lucia

She is about thirty-three, speaks French fluently. Her character is gay, sweet and ironic, but she has bursts of anger over nothing when she is confined to a straitjacket.' So wrote James Joyce in 1940, in a letter about his only daughter, Lucia. It is one of the few surviving portraits of her troubled life. Most other references to her have been lost. We know she was the daughter of the famous writer.
She was the lover of Samuel Beckett. She was a gifted dancer. From her late twenties she was treated for suspected schizophrenia. She spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum. But after her death, her voice was silenced. Her letters were destroyed. Correspondence concerning her disappeared from archives. Her story has been shrouded in mystery, the tomb door slammed shut. Lucia takes us into that darkness.
In sharp, cutting shards of narrative, Alex Pheby's new novel imagines what may have happened — but it is not an attempt to speak for Lucia. Rather, it is an act of empathy and contrition — one that constantly interrogates what it means to speak for other people.