Description
Compelling new novel of stigma and secrecy from Sunday Times bestseller
It is 1987 and a small Irish community is preparing for the wedding of two of its young inhabitants. They’re barely adults, not so long out of school and still part of the same set of friends they’ve grown up with. As the friends head home from the beach that last night before the wedding, there is a car accident.
Three survive the crash but three are killed. And the reverberations are felt throughout the small town. Connor, the young driver of the car, lives.
But staying among the angry and the mourning is almost as hard as living with the shame, and so he leaves the only place he knows for another life. Travelling first to Liverpool, then London, by the noughties he has made a home – of sorts – for himself in New York. The city provides shelter and possibility for the displaced, somewhere Connor can forget his past and forge a new life.
But the secrets, the unspoken longings and regrets that have come to haunt those left behind will not be silenced. And before long, Connor will have to meet his past.
Sarah Turner –
When Graham Norton published his first novel I was a dismissive – assumed “another celebrity writer” – totally wrongly, and without even reading it! I read his second, A Keeper, and adored – and immediately backtracked on all my assumptions. Home Stretch, his third novel, has utterly captivated me from the very first page and I feel truly bereft to now have finished this book.
Telling the story of a few families in a small Irish town, who have to deal with the aftermath of a tragedy involving 6 young people – that claims 3 lives, and alters the lives of the other 3 forever. From Ireland, to Liverpool, to London and New York, Norton deftly weaves together the stories that tie these families together… and break them apart.
This isn’t a great plot twister of a book – this is gentler and more meandering. At times I found myself blinking back tears, and at others wanting to cheer and clap! I loved every page of this book – and I am now going to undo my mistake of not reading his first novel – because this is an author I want to read everything he has written.