Jenny Haysom (Lucy Boyd)

Eventually, whether before a move or after a loss, we all have to make difficult decisions about what stays and what goes. Jenny Haysom’s debut novel Keep begins with a literal version of this challenging task as poet Harriet Baird attempts to sort the accumulated stuff of a lifetime into three piles: Give Away, Throw Away, and Keep. Harriet is assisted in this fraught exercise by Eleanor and Jacob, professional “stagers” hired by the realtor selling Harriet’s home to clear it out and redecorate it to appeal to potential buyers. Their brisk, practised pragmatism runs up against Harriet’s reluctance to reduce her possessions to only what will fit in a single room in the nursing home her son Alan has decided – because of Harriet’s age and increasing feebleness and forgetfulness – is the best place for her to spend her remaining years.

Harriet does not want to either leave her home or disperse her belongings. “The memories felt like abstractions now,” Harriet acknowledges, “stories she told herself to explain why life had taken its particular turns. But the things left behind? They were real, material evidence, like the little fingerprints in the apple-heart that sat on her desk.” Closest to her heart are the memories and few remaining traces of her little daughter Christina, who drowned long ago in the local swimming hole. Once before, Alan had taken it on himself to declutter, peremptorily stripping his sister’s long-preserved bedroom of “all things Christina,” much to Harriet’s shock and horror. Now she feels that Eleanor and Jacob, at Alan’s instigation, are “in the process of erasing her from her own house.” Harriet – always, as a writer, slightly adrift from reality – is only too aware that she is losing her grip: “now, the only solid objects were the things all around her, and the thought of getting rid of these things filled her with panic.”

Even as Eleanor and Jacob struggle to ease Harriet’s path through this difficult (though probably necessary) transition, they are entangled in their own personal problems, which also, in Haysom’s deft telling, turn on questions about what, or who, we hold on to, and why. Eleanor is the tired mother of three needy daughters, with a husband who does not pull his weight in the household; an unexpected pregnancy makes her “want to quit, to go on strike.” Jacob’s relationship with his lover Yves was already uneasy before he discovered Yves’s infidelity; he had dropped out of school “in the name of love,” but now finds himself hurt and alone, “with no home to return to.”

There are no easy answers for any of these characters about what to do next, and Haysom is wise enough not to turn the staging of Harriet’s house into a trite symbol for working out new beginnings. But eventually, after each character’s story reaches its own crisis, Harriet’s remaining things – everything she, or they, had kept – do become starting points for renewal. Keep is a wry yet tender exploration of the way our homes and possessions carry our memories and reflect our values; we should not, the novel suggests, be too ruthless in our sorting.