Drawing from her 30 years experience of practising as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist Prophecy Coles poses the question: what legacy do grief, loss and trauma have upon the second and third generations? She describes in great detail that it is the anguished return of traumatic experience that repeats across the generations and affects the way the future is experienced.

In this beautifully written short book, Coles introduces narratives from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, and biographical sketches of Gorky, Primo Levi (1958) and Churchill (1930) as examples of transgenerational tales. These highlight the often neglected areas in clinical practice where significant others in a child's early life were absent, such as dead siblings, forgotten