Is Mother Dead begins with Johanna, newly widowed and returned to her home country of Norway for a retrospective exhibition of her art, hoping to reconnect and reconcile with her mother. The reason for the estrangement is allegedly Johanna’s art which explores mother-child relationships in ways which her mother sees as unfavourable to her. This is a very claustrophobic, suffocating book that keeps us firmly in Johanna’s head as she obsesses about what her mother could be doing and thinking. She is stalked by thoughts of her mother, and in turn physically stalks her, making choices which are increasingly unwise. The reader can see that; Johanna cannot. Johanna’s thoughts don’t just span the present. She frequently ventures into the past and we can see how the relationship between mother and daughter played out in Johanna’s childhood. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers but will say that domestic abuse, emotional abuse and generational trauma all play a role. The stream of consciousness style and non traditional formatting both contribute to the fraught, tense mental and emotional atmosphere which was the the standout aspect of this book for me.