Waves

Hal’s annual family trip to Cornwall has changed irrevocably. For the first time he is making the journey without his older sister Charley, who has been in a coma since their holiday the previous year.

Filled with anger and questions about his sister’s apparent accident, Hal revisits the places and people Charley spent time with during her last holiday and slowly pieces together her final days.

A picture emerges of the joy and pain of first love combined with the lure of the sea and the freedom it represents, disconcertingly partly through Charley’s own voice, which appears with increasing urgency in Hal’s mind.

This is a haunting, beautifully written novel, with a gripping narrative, which switches between Hal and Charley and from past to present, carrying the reader along in waves of emotion and suspense.