Winterton Blue
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Two damaged souls find a chance at love on the English coast in this "darkly charming" novel by the author of Man Booker Prize finalist, The Hiding Place (Kirkus Reviews).
For twenty years Lewis has been haunted by his twin brother's death. Try as he might to escape this tragedy, the ghost of Wayne confronts him at every turn. Anna is also haunted—by her loud and carefree mother, Rita, who just so happens to be very much alive. When Lewis meets Anna, he is pulled into a world of carousing, music hall turns, and cocktails as he searches for the person he believes responsible for Wayne's death.
Against the backdrop of the Norfolk coast, with its massive skies and relentless seas, Anna and Lewis slowly learn to trust each other and accept that an uncertain future can be as wild and alluring as the landscape they have grown to love. In this deeply affecting novel, "Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark and Graham Greene all come to mind, but Azzopardi's style is all her own" (Chicago Tribune).
A New York Times Editors' Choice
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anna, a graphic designer, may have a streak of gray in her hair, but she's still young and inchoate. Lewis, a dodgy loner, is on a late, misguided, oedipally fueled quest to avenge his twin brother's death following a car accident 20 years earlier. In alternating scenes sometimes whole chapters, sometimes just a few paragraphs Anna and Lewis meet, and, uneasily, inflame each other at a British seaside B&B. The place is owned by Anna's mother, Rita, who at 76 is vivacious but in shaky health; Anna has been summoned there by Rita's quasi- companion, retired actor Vernon Savoy, to look in on her. Anna, partially deaf (perhaps psychologically) since childhood, seems so vulnerable, and Lewis (who is tracking down the death car's driver), so blankly menacing, that as they come together murder seems as likely as romance. Vernon, meanwhile, has little patience for Anna's ambivalence toward Rita. The Welsh-born Azzopardi, whose Hiding Place was a Man Booker finalist, does certain kinds of interiority exquisitely, as when writing about Anna's obsession with Rita's tourmaline ring. But her extreme stream-of-consciousness style forces readers to fill in narrative gaps, offers few clues to Anna's feeling for Lewis and makes secondary characters (Anna's charming maybe-suitor Brendan; Lewis's thuggish-yet-sweet sometime-stepfather Manny) confuse more than thicken the plot.
