Somewhere More Simple

A book it's difficult to put down. An absorbing exploration of coming to terms with love, loss and belonging, set against the vividly evoked atmosphere of the Isles of Scilly.

A small community, cut off from Cornwall by thirty miles of sea. At the whim of Atlantic storms. A landscape lit by a shifting kaleidoscope of colour and light .

Cari returns as a young teacher to the islands that captured her imagination in childhood. Now they take her way beyond known waters. She becomes involved with two people who have their own reasons for returning – Anna, a painter in her fifties who has cut herself off from her mainland past, and Hugh, drawn to the islands by a taste for self-reliance but now adrift. When a young girl disappears while on a school trip to the mainland all three are drawn into the mystery, and the unanswered questions of their own pasts become more urgent to resolve.

'Her writing has a poet's sensitivity and grace.' The Scotsman

'Marion Molteno has the kind of talent that works almost invisibly. She writes with great simplicity about ordinary people, yet that ordinariness is universal.' Mary Loudon, in The Independent