Sharing Blood

Imagine a man. Thick-thighed. Mounted. A man on a horse in a wide, romantic valley, the sun slung low on his western shoulder. Who else can he be, but the hero?

But Ernest has not idea how to be a hero. He's having enough trouble understanding how to be a husband, a father, a man.

Ernest Edward Axelrod, noxious weeds inspector and amateur bat enthusiast, tongue-tied and duty-bound; a man exceptional only for his size, his knowledge of Latin taxonomy and, in his youth, his home address. His wife will never forgive him - for the man his is; for the hero he isn't.

His daughter bares her teeth at him and turns her back. His mother can barely remember his name. Even safe, solid Yoxford, the town he has lived in all his life, seems to have developed a fugitive air, an underlying lunacy that reminds him of his own impermanence, of the falseness and fragility of his story.

But one evening at dusk, Earnest enters a darkened room and kneels, puts out his hands and feels for the first time, the life of his son. He hears his hungry, lonely voice, echoing, and he feeds him, hard, dry facts. And the facts merge into memory, give rise to a story; the story of the summer of Buffalo Balls; of a boy, journeying alone, in the presence of men.

'Sharing Blood' is concerned with the power of the narrative to fill the silences between us. To bind us together and give us immunity from death.