Prince Rupert's Teardrop

Mary undresses and wades into the boating lake. She dives and opens her eyes. In the blur, she perceives the outline of a head - she reaches...A dead bird.

But she will keep searching. Because Mary's mother, Meghranoush - a ninety-four year-old survivor of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army early in the twentieth century - has vanished.

Mary is already known to the police: a serial telephoner, a reporter of wrongdoing, a nuisance.Her doctor talks of mental illness.

But what has happened is not just inside her head. A trail of glass birds mocks her. A silver thimble shines at the riverbed - a thimble that belonged to her mother.

A glassblower burns a body in a furnace and uses the ash to colour a vase.

Rumours circulate of a monster stalking the women of Plymouth.

Has her mother simply left - trying to escape the ghosts of genocide in her mind - or has she been abducted?

It is left to this most unreliable and unpredictable of daughters to try to find her, in this moving, lyrical, and very powerful work.