Winterton Blue

Lewis has a problem, and it won’t go away. For the last twenty years, he has been haunted by the memory of his brother, by a stolen car and a river running full, and most of all by the boy at the wheel. Carl Finn, sociopath, liar, and drug runner, has remained his enemy. Lewis’s life is one of self-torment and introversion, all darkness and no light – until he meets Anna.

Anna is haunted too, but her ghost is very much alive. Rita, Anna’s mother, is the exact opposite of her daughter. Loud, carefree, a daredevil, at seventy-six and with a boarding house to run, she really ought to take more care. Rita has suffered a fall, which forces Anna to leave London and spend the winter looking after her mother in Yarmouth. It would be straightforward, were it not for Vernon, a retired actor and bon vivant, who behaves more like Rita’s boyfriend than a paying guest. Despite Anna’s protestations, the two live every day as if it might be their last.

Into this environment of carousing and cocktails stumbles Lewis, set to find the person responsible for his brother’s death. He recognizes in Anna a kindred spirit, and she in him. As they search for solutions to their problems, Anna and Lewis find themselves having to face troubling truths about who they are and what they might become – with electrifying consequences.

Told against the backdrop of the Norfolk coast, with its massive skies and devastating sea, Winterton Blue is an enthralling novel from the Booker-shortlisted author of The Hiding Place and Remember Me. In prose that touches the sublime, Trezza Azzopardi tells a moving, funny and sad story, one that never lets the reader go.