He sees her in all of her different guises. Diana is the central figure in Byron’s life. The children wait to have their mother back come Monday morning. His father only comes home at weekends and with him comes a dark change in atmosphere as everything becomes more constrained. Turning to his intellectual best friend James they come up with a plan, Operation Perfect, to protect her.īyron lives with his younger sister Lucy and his seemingly perfect mother Diana. For Byron, young and confused, were it not for this small change, this brief moment in time, his life would have continued as easily as before. It is here that Byron sees his watch go back as the two extra seconds are added to time.

Running late Diana takes a short cut through a sink estate. This happens during an ordinary drive to school. “It’s the difference between something happening and something not happening… It’s very dangerous.” And indeed Byron is right as the adding of the two seconds triggers a change in his life and that of his family that ripple down the months and years that follow. “Two seconds are huge,” he tells his mother Diana. Whereas two seconds would pass most people by, Byron is acutely aware that two seconds is all that it takes for something monumental to happen. This is the year when two extra seconds are going to be added at the end of the month so as to bring the clock back in line with the movement of the Earth. Eleven year old Byron, a middle class child who spends his time studying for exams and discussing the meaning of life with his Times reading friend James. Perfect is told from the perspective of two different characters in two different time periods. This unique debuted demonstrated Joyce’s ability to combine the sadness of life with the hope and joy. Her first was 2012’s celebrated The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry in which a pensioner walks across England in order to say goodbye to a dying friend.

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