What Grief Leaves Behind: On Isla Morley’s Come Sunday

It begins on Maundy Thursday, the kind of day where the weight of the world doesn’t come all at once but in small, unremarkable pieces. A child wants to wear something impractical. A husband moves too slowly. A wife, already overwhelmed, tries to hold everything together. Abbe Deighton, the wife in question, has a full day ahead and plans for the evening. To make room for it all, she leaves her daughter Cleo with a friend. Not the friend she first thought of, but one close enough. A safe choice, she believes. The kind of everyday compromise parents make constantly. But by nightfall, the road outside that friend’s house is clogged with police, neighbors, and blue lights. Cleo is gone.

Some novels teach, some entertain, and some simply sit with you. Come Sunday, Isla Morley’s first does the last. It does not move with urgency. It does not try to dazzle. It opens a door to grief and leaves it open, inviting you to stand in the doorway and feel the air turn cold. Morley’s writing is beautiful, but not in the way that sings. It aches. Her sentences are shaped like thoughts too heavy to say out loud, and the pain that unfolds is neither linear nor dramatic. It is quiet, slow, and brutal.

Abbe is not the kind of grieving mother literature often presents. She does not become saintly or soft. She hardens. Her pain turns inward, then outward, until she is brittle and sharp with almost everyone she meets. Her anger doesn’t follow a neat trail. It leaps at the driver who hit Cleo, at her husband Greg for believing God can make sense of it, at the neighbors who bring condolences that feel like performance. Abbe isn’t likable. But grief rarely is.

Morley’s decision to root the novel’s timeline in the liturgical calendar isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a backbone. The story opens on Maundy Thursday and ends over a year later on Ascension Day. These are not just dates. In Christian tradition, Maundy Thursday is associated with the betrayal. Ascension Day is about leaving earth behind. Abbe’s betrayal is personal, leaving her daughter with someone else. The ascension is personal, too. She doesn’t transcend grief in a radiant epiphany. She simply learns to live with it. In that sense, Morley uses religion not as a theme, but as a form of architecture. She builds the story with its rhythms in mind, not to evangelize, but to ground her characters in a tradition that, like grief, asks us to sit with what cannot be solved.

Greg, Abbe’s husband, is a minister. After Cleo’s death, he does what ministers do: he turns to prayer, to faith, to community. Abbe turns away. Their pain pulls them in opposite directions. Greg looks for meaning. Abbe looks for silence. The novel doesn’t frame one as right and the other as wrong. It simply lets them drift, as people do, when the same loss cuts in different ways.

Come Sunday isn’t just about what happened. It’s about everything that happened before, and everything that must happen after. Abbe grew up in South Africa during apartheid, in a household full of silence and complicity. Her grandmother’s house, which she inherits, once employed a Black servant named Beauty. That house is now a school for HIV-positive children. The past has changed form but not weight. Returning to it, Abbe must confront the racism that shaped her childhood, the family stories she once accepted without question, and the uncomfortable truth that grief alone doesn’t erase history. These scenes in Port Elizabeth are some of the most powerful in the book. Not because they are filled with drama, but because they are honest. Morley does not pretend that pain makes people good. She simply shows that it makes people real.

The cultural moment this novel entered matters too. Published in 2009, Come Sunday arrived during a period when American readers were steeped in memoirs about loss. Books like The Year of Magical Thinking taught us that it was okay to write through pain, as long as that pain eventually turned to wisdom. Morley does not promise wisdom. She promises presence. She writes a woman who gets worse before she gets any better. A woman who pushes people away. A woman whose grief becomes something she holds onto not because she wants to, but because it has fused with her.

And here is where the novel becomes more than a story. It becomes a challenge to how we think about grief, and how we expect people, especially women, to survive it. We are accustomed to mothers who mourn quietly, who say the right things, who make others feel comfortable in their suffering. Abbe refuses all of it. She does not want to be consoled. She does not want to be admired. She wants her daughter back. Failing that, she wants the world to stop pretending she should be okay.

There is a scene late in the novel where Abbe returns to a church and sees children singing. The sound pierces her. Not because it heals her, but because it reminds her of what is gone. This is the tone Morley strikes again and again. Not resolution, but reminder. Not healing, but the stubborn fact of memory. Cleo is not coming back. Abbe will never be who she was. There is no going back to life as it was before.

What she finds, instead, is a way forward. A slow, stumbling, often infuriating path that winds through guilt, through exhaustion, through forgiveness that does not come all at once. She reconnects with her brother. She writes letters she may never send. She begins to understand that love and loss are not opposites. They are twins.

This is not a redemptive story in the conventional sense. It doesn’t offer a clean emotional payoff. It simply keeps going. And maybe that is the point. Maybe the most radical thing a grieving mother can do is keep going.

The book left me feeling hollow, in the way that certain truths do. I haven’t lost a child. But I recognized the way grief lives in the body. How it rewires memory. How it distorts time. I found myself thinking about the moments when we want to say the right thing and realize no words will help. When someone breaks in front of us, and all we can do is sit close and be quiet. This novel is that silence.

It is also, in its own quiet way, a mirror. It reflects back the things we do not always want to see. The way we judge other people’s pain. The way we expect them to package it. The way we give grief a time limit. Morley’s refusal to do any of that makes the book difficult to read. But it also makes it important.

Some novels leave you changed, and novels that leave you honest. Come Sunday, does the latter. It strips away illusion. It says, This is how it feels. This is how long it takes. This is what it looks like to live in the wreckage. Not to fix it. Just to live there.

Abbe doesn’t become someone else. She becomes more herself. Slowly. Painfully. Truthfully. And in a world obsessed with transformation, that might be the truest kind of hope we can ask for.

Not everything can be healed.

Not every story ends in light.

But sometimes, surviving the dark is enough.

Images used under fair use for review purposes. Book cover and author photo via Simon & Schuste