Passant offers an account of a doubly divided family, involving its New Zealand and wealthy, distant British branches during the 1930s and 1940s. It covers the early years of its chief protagonist who relates the experience of growing up against the background of the Great Depression and the Second World War, in a family torn apart by tragedy"”particularly the death of a lawyer grandfather at the age of forty in a New Zealand mental institution and its subsequent and calculated concealment. Worse though, on top of the family's secrets, misdiagnosed by a local doctor and just before his ninth birthday, the boy falls seriously ill. Drifting in and out of a coma, he undergoes major surgery, followed by almost two years in a hospital bed. This is a book of personal survival and the psychological consequences of lies and concealment, of a divided family and the disrupted lives of those belonging to it.
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