Larchfield: The moving, gripping and wonderful debut about finding human connection - Hardcover

'A work of considerable talent' Richard Ford
'Mysterious, wondrous, captivating' Louis de Bernieres

In 1930 an awkward and brilliant young man of twenty-four arrives to teach at a crumbling prep school in Helensburgh, a seaside town in the west of Scotland. The young man is W.H. Auden and the next two years will transform and torment him in equal measure.

In 2008, Dora Fielding arrives into Helensburgh, newly married and pregnant. A published poet, she's at first hopeful about the prospect of a new life that combines motherhood and creativity. But once her child is born and she is at home alone, she comes to find the reality of small town life suffocating and, eventually, terrifying.

The human need for connection drives these two brave and vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Beautiful and haunting, Larchfield is about the nature of sanity, the relationships between strangers and loved ones, and the power of the human imagination to transcend suffering.