Mother Country — Elisabeth Russell Taylor

From the opening reference to embalming to the final sentence's ironical echo of the title, this stark work by English novelist Taylor ( Tomorrow ) is haunted by the trauma of lost parental love. Charlotte Sinclair has summoned her sister Antonia back to the family home in London to pay her last respects to their dying mother. But respect is the last thing Antonia feels for the woman who abused her as a child. As she sits by her mother's deathbed, Antonia finds herself reliving scenes from her W W II era childhood--painful, long-repressed memories of vicious punishment at the hands of her well-to-do British father and German Jewish mother. Her struggle to bury the past with the body of her mother, told in a quiet, reflective first-person narration, eventually leads Antonia to abandon home and work in England in favor of Israel, where she finds in her victimized childhood a link to her Jewish heritage and a distressing metaphor for Israel's current problems. This disturbing tale of physical and emotional abuse offers sharp personal and political insights into the relations of victims and victimizers within families as well as the family of nations. ( Apr. )