By the Booker-shortlisted author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour, a wry, poignant novel about a man trying to escape his fame as the boy in his mother's bestselling books.[...]
On the night of May 3rd, 1942, fifteen-year-old Alma Braithwaite and her fellow boarders at Goldwyn's school huddle in an air-raid shelter as bombs rain down on Exeter in one of the Baedeker raids. By the time the girls emerge, half the school is in ruins and the city centre has been destroyed. Twen[...]
Alma Braithwaite was a teenager in Exeter when her boarding school was bombed in 1942. Twenty-one years later, she remains alone in the house where she grew up, teaching music at her old school, unable to move on from the tragic events of the war. It takes the arrival of an innovative new headmistre[...]