The Roadmap of Loss

It’s 1997 in Melbourne, Australia, and Mark Ward is struggling to make sense of the world following the sudden death of his mother. His father, Dylan, had abandoned him and his mother when Mark was still a child, and Mark has always believed he died in a car accident shortly afterwards. For most of his life, he has carried an unjustifiable sense of guilt about his father’s absence, overlaid with memories of him as a cruel and unloving man.

Clearing out his mother’s house, a bereft, ra…