Not one person talked about their week first, which has never once happened.

Bridget picked it, and Bridget picks well about one time in four, and this was the one.

What I noticed was that nobody hedged. Usually there's an enormous amount of "well I suppose" in that room; this time everybody had a position and arrived holding it. Deborah came in with a page marked, read out the passage about the children being told their mother had gone away, put the book face down and said "that is a real house, on a real street, and those are real people who are alive now." Fiona, who argues with literally everything, said nothing at all.

The one I have known for two years without ever catching her name grew up in Belfast. We all knew that and not one of us had ever asked her a single thing about it. She talked for ten minutes and I'm not putting any of it here.

My own view is barely worth adding, but: it could very easily have been a thriller about a disappearance, and instead it keeps stopping to ask what telling it costs the people still living. Eight, and it's an eight because the last section on the archive drags and I was ready to be finished.

We've broken our own rule and picked another non-fiction for next month...