Dimensions
143 x 223 x 23mm
'I was eighteen years, two months and two days when my father came to see me in the nursing home and told me that Johnny was dead. Drowned. Lost at Sea.'
Johnny, an outstanding young swimmer, went missing nearly thirty years ago: drowned, or so everyone except his sister Imogen, the narrator of Jennifer Johnston's beguiling new novel, believes.
The event literally leaves Imogen speechless, for how could this happen? Johnny, encouraged, pushed even, from a child by his father, could have made the Olympic team, couldn't he?
In the company of his friend Bruno, the handsome young German tutor, Imogen has seen him slicing through the water, staying out for hours before racing back gleaming. She has sailed with the two young men out across the bay that lies beneath the old stone house Great Grandfather bought at the beginning of the century.
In this wonderfully written novel, Jennifer Johnston tells of the year that changed their lives forever. The sheer brilliance of her storytelling and the beauty of her prose show her to be the mistress of her craft: able to cross generations with consummate skill - for tragic echoes connect the narrator with the Great War and Dublin in the nineteen-twenties.
Letters, memoirs, fragments, poetry and music imbue the novel with a richness that all but overwhelms the reader.
