Case Histories: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses child sexual abuse, the death of a child, murder, violence, domestic violence, suicide, and rape.

The quest for justice and closure drives each of the novel’s titular “case histories,” including Jackson’s own history of loss. Though the novel does offer closure for readers, Atkinson comments on genre conventions through Michelle, who thinks that “[n]ovels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on” (66). This offers an early warning against expecting perfectly tidy closure for every case or missing person. For example, Niamh’s killer is never discovered. Jackson begrudgingly accepts this, thinking that the north holds only “bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway” (74). He is similarly pessimistic about solving the Land sisters’ mystery: “He would never find Olivia, never find out what happened to her, he knew that and he would just have to find the right time to tell them that” (166). Contrary to Jackson’s expectations, he is able to uncover the truth of what happened to Olivia and to return her body to the family.