Description
Things come back in Wychcombe because nobody moves them.
Summer 1976, the hottest England can remember. The river has dropped to the colour of tea, the lawns are yellow to the roots, and fifteen-year-old Andrew Lowell is sent from Reading to his great-aunt Ida in Wychcombe, away from parents who since January have spoken to each other only through him. He is good at carrying sentences from one room to the next, and he keeps a secret he has never told anyone: he cannot hold on to faces. He knows people by their hands and their voices, by a silver ring on a thumb, a binocular strap patched with string. Between the Lido, the allotments and the still water under the alders, Mara, Colin and June hand him folded notes to deliver, and Andrew carries them, while the village watches him as though it had lived this summer once already.
Then the drought lowers the river far enough to give back a bicycle lost twenty-three summers earlier, and Wychcombe begins, quietly, to remember. Told in close, unhurried prose, this is a novel of hay bales and scythes, darkrooms and produce shows, a cold cup of tea poured every year for the same chair, and a boy learning that some messages have to be carried by the one who holds them. A coming-of-age story set in a rural England that has kept every summer it ever had.
For readers of Claire Keegan, L. P. Hartley and Alan Garner.
Details
Publisher - Lyth Archive Editions
Language - English
Perfect Bound
Contributors
Author
Antonio Martellotta
Published Date - 2026-10-06
ISBN - 9791224351917
Dimensions - 19.8 x 12.9 x 0.8 cm
Page Count - 131
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