The Beacon - Couverture rigide

'Magnificent...It is all done so well, so wisely, that this short book is richly satisfying...it is a little masterpiece' Daily Telegraph

'A moving, evocative and rewarding novel' The Times

'The Beacon uses a small canvas, but it examines larger issues of truth, mental health and memory...Ideas about wasted lives, about grinding exhaustion at the expense of self-expression and about rank injustice are all here in a novel of great structural and stylistic control' Guardian

Colin. May. Frank. Berenice. The Prime children grew up in a bleak North Country farmhouse called the Beacon. Colin and Berenice married locally. May went to university in London, but came home within a year and never left again. Only Frank, quiet, watchful Frank, got away. He left for Fleet Street and a career in journalism but it's the publication of a book about his childhood that brings the fame and money he craved - and tears his family apart.

'Short, beautifully crafted and gripping' Sunday Times

'Captivating' Financial Times

'The farmhouse was called The Beacon and they had been born and reared there, May, Colin, Frank and Berenice, but only May had been left for the last 27 years ...'

May had been the clever daughter and she had escaped the shelter of The Beacon, just once, to go to university. But in London she had been pursued by nameless terrors, the victim of fears and anxieties. Now she was the spinster daughter, the one who stayed, who nursed her father after his accident and looked after her mother in her old age.

Frank was the one who got away. He married and moved on. But why does no one ever mention Frank's name?