RESULTS

To love someone, need you know everything about them? When Alice and Joseph meet, they fall quickly into a tentative but serious relationship. She is a nurse, he a painter and decorator; both are still young and hopeful of each other, but each brings with them an emotional burden. Alice's father has been a yawning absence all her life, and her beloved grandmother - who helped raise her - has recently died. For his part, Joseph refuses to speak about his army experiences in Northern Ireland and Alice suspects that his general reticence hides an even more deeply troubled past. When her widowed grandfather begins to tell Joseph about his own RAF experiences in l950s Kenya - stories he had shared only with his wife - something still raw is tapped in Joseph; his reaction to the older man's unburdening of guilt is both unexpected and devastating for them all.

With a range of settings as diverse as the Scottish seaside and post-Communist eastern Germany, Seiffert uses the locations of these stories to bring her characters into relief. Powerfully evoking our human need for connection, Field Study takes us on journeys that demonstrate both the fragility and adaptability of our emotions. From a family that fears upsetting their little boy by moving house, to a wife who refuses to accept her husband's condemnation of his own father; from a student conducting his scientific graduate studies of eastern European pollution to a wartime mother's escape as she carries her children across a swollen river, Seiffert isolates and captures not only the underlying and compelling sorrow of love, but also the joy and desire for that love that keeps us alive.