The wrong child / Barry Gornell.
Publication details: London : Orion, 2017.Description: 266 pages ; 22 cmISBN:- 9781409171812 (paperback)
- 823.9/2 23
- PR6107.O6773 W76 2016
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Fiction | GOR | Available | 067048 |
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Freight Books.
MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FICTION (POST C 1945). 22 of the 23 children in a rural village die in a disaster. By chance, the 'wrong' child, Dog Evans, lives. Crippled with survivors' guilt, his parents abandon Evans to a feral life at the margins. He is shunned by those left behind, for whom his presence is a daily insult, a reminder of unbearable loss. As the action moves from past to present and back, we learn what took place and its shocking consequences, both for Dog Evans and the wider community. Gornell's forensic gaze dissects the lives of the bereaved, fractured relationships and existences frozen the day their children died...Deborah Cutter, separated from her husband John, numbs her pain with alcohol and sex. Local postman Nugget holds tight to the hope that the Evans house contains valuable secrets. Parish priest Father Wittin is an embarrassing irrelevance...As grief turns to rage, the villagers' insatiable desire for catharsis, one final blood sacrifice, becomes unstoppable.