Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own.

Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbors and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank.

Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War. When war breaks out again, Leon must go from sculpting sugar figurines to killing young men as a conscript in the Vietnam War.

A beautiful debut novel about fathers and sons, and the things we struggle to say out loud by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2013.

About the Author
Evie Wyld is the award-winning author of four novels and one graphic novel. She has won the Betty Trask Award, Miles Franklin Award, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Encore Award, Jerwood Fiction Prize and the European Union Prize. In 2013 she was included in Granta's once-a-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and runs an independent bookshop in Peckham called Review.

Reviews
Just sometimes, a book is so complete, so compelling and potent, that you are fearful of breaking its hold. This is one: a novel about (as its title might suggest) devastating damage and the humanity that, almost unfathomably, remains...with awesome skill and whiplash wit, Evie Wyld knits together past and present, with tension building all the time. In Peter Carey and Tim Winton, Australia has produced two if the finest storytellers working today. On this evidence, Wyld can match them both -- Stephanie Cross * Daily Mail *
Wyld sympathetically explores the blight of war and violence on three generations of a working-class Australian family -- Gabriel Byng * New Statesman *
Wyld's first novel is a remarkable achievement: a potent and compelling exploration of the connections between father and son, and the legacy of violence and repression * bookmunch.wordpress.com/ *
Superb first novel -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Wyld has a feel for beauty and for the ugliness of inherited pain * The New Yorker *


Awards
Winner of John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize 2009. Short-listed for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2011 and Orange Award for New Writers 2010.



Book Information
ISBN 9780099535836
Author Evie Wyld
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 213g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 18mm