Maroon

People said you needed a sunny day for Summerdon, the sun perked it up a bit, but you couldn?t expect the sun to make a lasting impression on the town. It didn?t seem interested, and never stayed for long.

Here, a man who has watched all life, but to whom nothing has ever happened, sits at a second-floor window and gazes out at the Irish Sea. A woman, not far away, is lost in a world where fiction, dreams and reality have blurred into one, where time past and time present are so entangled as to obscure any future that might exist outside her ever-closed windows.

Here, two sisters share a deep secret that only remains buried by the stifled resentment each feels for the other.

Here, there are ghosts too: Seb, who hardly remembers himself, Georgie, for whom the dead have so long held a stronger sway than the living, and three children who play upon the sands and among the tombs, speaking more wisely than their elders and who may never truly die. But everything changes, and knowledge is power, and for some, redemption may yet be an unlooked-for possibility.

By turns haunting, charming and almost unbearably bleak, Adrian Wright?s Maroon is a masterfully subtle evocation of British life and the English psyche.