Breaking the Chain

Her daughter cries without making a sound. Mariam knows exactly where she learned it.

Mariam Rahman has built the life she once dreamed of: a career in Johannesburg, a steady husband, a beautiful home and two daughters. Then nine-year-old Layla drops a glass of orange juice on the kitchen floor, and Mariam's voice fills the room before she can stop it. On her knees among the shards, she sees the tears on the tiles. Her daughter has been crying the whole time, without a sound.

Mariam used to do that too. In her mother's house in Lenasia, it was called respect.

When she finds a folded list in Layla's homework diary, Don't make Mama upset. Say sorry first. Don't cry where people can see, Mariam is forced to face the rules she wrote at the same age and the promise she made never to pass them on. But good intentions don't erase what we inherit. Between Sunday lunches with a mother who loves through food and silence, a husband who leaves the room when things get hard, and a daughter who has started watching her face for weather, Mariam must learn the hardest skill of all: how to come back and repair what she breaks.

Told with honesty, warmth and quiet humour, and grounded in faith, Breaking the Chain is a novel about three generations of women, the love that hurts and the courage it takes to choose differently.

For readers who have ever wondered whether they became their mother, and for anyone determined that the pattern stops with them.