Daily Times

It isn’t often that a book touches you in a way that you find yourself thinking about it long after you’ve turned the final page.

The Image of Her is one of those books.

Stella lives with her mother, a smothering narcissist. When she succumbs to dementia, the pressures on Stella’s world intensify, culminating in tragedy. As Stella recovers from a near fatal accident, she feels compelled to share her trauma but she finds talking difficult. In her head she confides in Connie because there’s no human being in the world that she feels closer to.

Connie is an expat living in Dubai with her partner, Mark, and their two children. On the face of it she wants for nothing and yet … something about life in this glittering city does not sit well with her. Used to working full time in a career she loves back in England, she struggles to find meaning in the expat life of play-dates and pedicures.

Two women set on a collision course. When they finally link up, it will not be in a way that you, or I, or anyone would ever have expected.

Having loved Velton’s debut, Blackberry and Wild Rose, I went into this book with even higher expectations. I can honestly say that it didn’t disappoint. It isn’t easy to write about dementia and the emotional baggage that comes with it both for the person and their carer, the claustrophobia of relationships and what happens when it feels like everything is lost. It is even harder to give everything a thrilling twist, to create a gripping page turner that one will be forced to read well into the early hours of the morning. Velton, however, manages to achieve just that.

Connie is an expat living in Dubai with her partner, Mark, and their two children. On the face of it she wants for nothing and yet … something about life in this glittering city does not sit well with her

Stella is written in a way that would endear her to readers, but also make them question her relationship with her narcissistic mother who manages to wield significant control over her life despite her dementia. Velton shows us what happens when dementia ravages the human mind, leaving behind only a shell of the person behind. She also writes about hope and compassion and how they can be a source of light in the darkest of times.

With Connie, Velton easily brings Dubai to life. Writing about the expat lifestyle with a sharp precision, Velton shows us that all is not what it seems in the glittering lives of Dubai’s elite and that beneath the façade of joy and fulfilment, there can be a chasm of sadness and loneliness.

The Image of Her is a thought-provoking book full of wisdom and heart, but one that does not shy away from delving into the darker recesses of the human mind and challenge everything we think we know about ourselves. Stella and Connie are characters that will stay with readers for a long time.

At once moving and enthralling, this book will make you cry but it will also make you smile. It may be literary fiction, but it’s also a compulsive page turner that kept me hooked well into the early hours of the morning. Emotional and thought provoking, The Image of Her is a testament to an author at the height of her powers.

The writer is an entrepreneur and the founding director of The Writing Institute in Pakistan. He can be reached at k_awais2003@hotmail.com and Tweets at @AwaisKhanAuthor