1963. The year the Beatles first top the charts. The year Martin Luther King has a dream. The year Truman Bird moves his family from their home in Brighton to a dilapidated caravan in the Ashdown Forest – then disappears.
Truman’s a charmer, a chancer, a liar. He’s always got away with it, too. But now he’s gone a dangerous step too far and only has one day to put things right – before he loses everything.
For Truman’s wife, Christie, life has not turned out the way she’d imagined. How has she, that young girl of not that many years ago, ended up like this? In a caravan. With three children. And an absent husband.
Honest and unsettling, yet ultimately uplifting, this unique, wise and addictive British debut weaves themes of love, betrayal, family and childhood, and shows that even though life has a habit of getting in the way of dreams, people find their own extraordinary ways of bouncing back.
Truman’s a charmer, a chancer, a liar. He’s always got away with it, too. But now he’s gone a dangerous step too far and only has one day to put things right – before he loses everything.
For Truman’s wife, Christie, life has not turned out the way she’d imagined. How has she, that young girl of not that many years ago, ended up like this? In a caravan. With three children. And an absent husband.
Honest and unsettling, yet ultimately uplifting, this unique, wise and addictive British debut weaves themes of love, betrayal, family and childhood, and shows that even though life has a habit of getting in the way of dreams, people find their own extraordinary ways of bouncing back.
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Reviews
The characters in the novel are strongly drawn and engage the emotions. In just a word or two, Mark Haysom seems able to evoke the pain of a deserted parent or the fear of a little boy
The book is bound to succeed. This novel is both original and stylish
This first novel places Haysom up there with the literary luminaries
Funny and heartbreaking