Behind the scenes at the museum

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the first novel of the English writer Kate Atkinson, published in 1995 and set in York.

Ruby is born in 1951 in a flat above a pet shop, and the book moves forward in thirteen chapters in which she reports what is happening to her family and what she makes of it. Her mother Bunty is disappointed in almost everything, her father George is mostly absent, her sisters have their own difficulties, and the family business does not make money. In between those chapters Atkinson cuts to the past and hands the narration to one of Ruby's female ancestors, so the reader learns who the family has lost and when, while Ruby does not. The result is the history of four generations of women told in two directions at once, and the losses the family never discusses are exactly the ones the flashbacks explain.

The novel takes its title from the Castle Museum in York, which keeps the fronts of old city houses inside it, including one much like the house Ruby grows up in.