Our Fathers
A gripping, tender novel about fathers and sons from the highly acclaimed author
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4.0 • 14 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'A restrained tour-de-force, profoundly unsettling, brilliantly executed, and deeply humane' Emily St. John Mandel, on The Followers
'A wonderful novel' Spectator
'This is a beautifully realised novel, touching on the fallibility of memory and the unknowability of families, and gripping in its intensity. Outstanding' The Mail on Sunday
What kind of man kills his own family?
When Tom was eight years old, his father took a shotgun and shot his family: his wife, his son and baby daughter, before turning the gun on himself. Only Tom survived.
He left his tiny, shocked community on the island of Litta and the strained silence of his Uncle Malcolm's house while still a young boy. For twenty years he's tried to escape his past. Until now.
Without knowing how to ask, he needs answers - from his uncle, who should have known. From his neighbours, who think his father a decent man who 'just snapped'. From the memories that haunt the wild landscape of the Hebrides.
And from the silent ones who know more about what happened - and why - than they have ever dared admit.
By turns gripping, beautiful, devastating and tender, Our Fathers is a story about violence and redemption, control and love. With understated compassion and humour, Rebecca Wait gives a voice to the silenced and to the silences between men of few words.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wait (The Followers) offers a thoughtful and wrenching portrait of a small Scottish town wracked by guilt over an incident of domestic violence. At 31, Tommy Baird returns to the Scottish island of Skellag after years of absence, following the murder-suicide of his mother, Katrina, and his two siblings by his father in 1994 when Tommy was a young boy; he survived by hiding in a wardrobe. Tommy stays with his uncle, Malcolm, despite Malcolm's reservations due to Tommy's violent tendencies as a pugnacious adolescent. Wait adroitly maps the craggy psychological terrain beneath Tommy and Malcolm's loaded silences, using Malcolm's difficulty in making conversation as a means to explore the shame of inaction as his brother abused Tommy's family for years. Malcolm's thoughts are mirrored by the reaction of Fiona, a town busybody who grapples with regrets for not helping when Katrina asked for aid to escape her husband. Wait builds tension through cyclical repetition of the characters' ruminations as they try to undo the past while revealing more of their own part in what happened. Fans of Patrick McCabe and Jon McGregor will appreciate Wait's melancholic snapshot.
Customer Reviews
Worth a read!
Heartbreakingly sad but the strength of the human spirit to survive runs throughout this book. A slow paced book but it still felt like a ‘page-turner’. I really enjoyed it.