'A heart-rending tale of a family in turmoil after the death of a child is kept secret from one of his siblings.
'When their eldest son drowns overseas, Gill and Gabe, desperate to protect their unwell teenaged daughter from the news, decide they must hide the truth from her at all costs - a decision that has ripple effects throughout their family. Told through alternating perspectives, with frequent flashbacks to the past, the story unfurls, revealing the key moments that have shaped each character into the people they are today.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is to write a story for adults from the point of view of a child. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë set the bar high with Jane Eyre, the first novel to achieve this. The story ends when Jane is a woman but commences with the child Jane’s perspective. So effective for readers was Brontë’s ground-breaking feat that Charles Dickens decided to write Great Expectations in the voice of the child Pip, after just hearing about Jane Eyre, even before reading it.' (Introduction)
'One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is to write a story for adults from the point of view of a child. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë set the bar high with Jane Eyre, the first novel to achieve this. The story ends when Jane is a woman but commences with the child Jane’s perspective. So effective for readers was Brontë’s ground-breaking feat that Charles Dickens decided to write Great Expectations in the voice of the child Pip, after just hearing about Jane Eyre, even before reading it.' (Introduction)
