The House of Broken Bricks
'Shocking and powerful . . . This is the best kind of story telling.' Victoria Hislop
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
'An almanac for the heart.'
EVIE WOODS, author of The Lost Bookshop
'Haunting prose that cracks the English pastoral novel and lets the darkness in. A pleasure to read.'
SARAH MOSS, author of Ghost Wall
'A clever, heartbreaking, heartwarming depiction of family love, grief and the possibility of hope.'
JO BROWNING WROE, author of A Terrible Kindness
'Poignant and unexpected . . . brave and subtle.'
EMMA HEALEY, author of Elizabeth is Missing
'Wonderful . . . brave in its deep truths about loss and love.'
INGRID PERSAUD, author of Love After Love
Ain't nothing wrong with being broken. Nothing at all. You're like these houses, not a whole brick in em and look how strong they are.
As Tess traces the sunrise over the floodplains, light that paints the house a startling crimson, she yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was. Instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen - Tess and Richard's 'rainbow twins' - Tess absorbs the quiet. The nights draw in, the soil cools and Richard fights to get his winter crops planted rather than deal with the discussion he cannot bear to have.
Secrets and vines clamber over the broken red bricks and although its inhabitants seem to be withering, in the damp, crumbling soil Sonny knows that something is stirring . . . As the seasons change, and the cracks let in more light, the family might just be able to start to heal.
This is the story of a broken family, what they see and what they cannot say laid bare in their overlapping perspectives. It is a tale of life in the cracks, because in the space for acceptance, of passing and of laying to rest, the possibilities of new energy, light and love, are seeded.
Readers love The House of Broken Bricks:
'Gorgeously written, lyrical, atmospheric and emotional.' @readingnpainting
'Brilliant story, a joy to read, couldn't put it down.' @lucy.reads.a.lot
'A masterpiece! Beautifully written, a brilliant debut novel.' @the_postcard_edit
'Heartwarming and heartbreaking. Tender and shocking. A joy to read.' @suzannahslibrary
'Absolutely spot-on in how it portrays children's emotional intuition, this is a beaut of a book.'
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Moving—and haunting in more ways than one—this is a novel about grief, belonging, and the ways love abides. Tess, her husband Richard and their young son Max are struggling to understand each other, and to communicate, in the aftermath of an unimaginable tragedy. Fiona Williams does not shy away from the worst of how they are hurting each other, but she treats each of their emotions—as they try, or don’t, to move forward—with great tenderness too. Set in rural England, just as much care and detail goes into her book’s rendering of the natural world and its unrelenting seasons. The result is a work that is both heartbreaking and stirring, with hope to offer, and many images that will stay with you long after you set it down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams's lyrical and haunting debut delves into the troubles faced by a mixed-race family in the English countryside. Tess and Richard's marriage is on the rocks, largely because Tess, who is Black and grew up in a Jamaican section of London, doesn't feel accepted in the couple's largely white agricultural community, and Richard, a farmer, is at a loss for how to support her. Their fraternal twin boys, Max and Sonny, are also struggling. Tess is often viewed with suspicion when she's with the lighter-skinned Max (one chilling scene involves a librarian forcing Tess to prove her identity before allowing her to leave with Max), while the darker-skinned Sonny is given racist nicknames by his primary school classmates. Around the novel's halfway point, Tess makes tentative plans to return to London with Sonny (her "mini-me"). In a twist that recasts much of the preceding narrative in a new light, her plans are disrupted by a tragic accident. The event is heavily foreshadowed and not particularly surprising, but its effect on the family is palpable. Williams skillfully juggles the perspectives of her four main characters to reveal their impressions of one another (Richard views Tess's anger as a "harsh whip") and evoke the pastoral landscape (Sonny finds the air "full of liquid skylark song"). Readers will be moved.
