“[I]t had carpet the colour and texture of instant coffee granules, a peach-tiled eighties bathroom replete with abandoned bidet and two broken doors on the pine kitchen cupboards.”

The novel uses figurative language to describe the shabby outdatedness of Nina’s apartment. Despite its flaws, she loves it because it is the first home that she’s owned. The apartment represents Nina’s success as an author and as a single woman.

“[T]he way he lazily outsourced his integrity to Yorkshire, so that romantic implications of miners and moors would do all the hard work for him.”

Geography and place become important motifs in the narrative as Nina draws a contrast between life in the city and life in the country. Where they grew up was a point of contention between Nina and Joe in their relationship, as southern England is viewed as the seat of power and the place where more educated, wealthier people live, and northern England is a more industrial, working-class region.

“Perhaps Dad always anticipated, somehow, that he should download the passing of time to papers, Filofax pages, letters, and postcards, in case those files inside him ever got wiped.”

Nina sees the stacks of paper in her father’s office as a metaphor for cataloging his memories. The idea of preserving memory becomes an important motif in the narrative as Nina wrestles with her father’s memory loss and wishes there was a way to preserve it. This filing system is analog, and later she wishes she could somehow upload his memories to the internet to preserve them for all time.