Wychcombe

Description

The summer of 1976 is the driest anyone in Wychcombe can remember. The river has shrunk to a trickle between cracked banks, the lawns have turned the colour of straw, and the whole village seems to be waiting for rain.

Andrew is fifteen and cannot keep faces. People he speaks to every day come apart in his memory the moment they leave the room, and he has learned to manage with voices, coats, the way someone carries a bag. He has four friends, and a notebook in which he writes down what he must not lose.

Over one long summer a sheet of paper folded in eight passes from hand to hand, and each of them opens it a little differently. Wychcombe is a quiet, exact novel about memory, belonging and the small things a village agrees to remember together, told in the heat and the dust of a place that is beginning to look like itself.