A Cracked Plaster Sky
by Kay Adshead
Across seven turbulent decades, a fiercely imaginative Manchester girl survives betrayal, exploitation, addiction and prison while following a mysterious inner voice towards the one thing she has never stopped searching for: herself.
Manchester, 1954. Grace enters the world apparently lifeless and is shocked into breath beneath a cracked plaster ceiling. As a child in Cheetham Hill she is bright, imaginative and hungry for a world beyond the streets she knows: trains, the sea, rockets, planets and stars.
At fourteen, a devastating betrayal shatters that childhood. Grace runs away and begins a journey that will carry her through Manchester, London, Berlin and beyond. She survives by wit, invention and sheer stubbornness, moving through worlds of homelessness, sex work, drugs, dangerous relationships and imprisonment. Along the way, a mysterious Voice accompanies her—sometimes warning, sometimes questioning, sometimes seeming to know Grace better than she knows herself.
Years pass, but Grace’s past refuses to remain buried. Memories reappear, people are lost and found, and institutions attempt to explain her in language that never quite contains her. Yet the imaginative child who once stared towards the moon has not vanished.
Spanning seven decades, A Cracked Plaster Sky follows Grace’s search for something she has been missing almost all her life. Told through masks, live music, projections and a constantly transforming sandpit, it is a darkly comic, lyrical and uncompromising story about shame, survival, memory and the possibility of becoming visible to oneself again.