Passions run high in Alison MacLeod's strikingly original novel of love and prejudice in wartime Brighton.

1940, Brighton. Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the town beaches. The crisis passes – others lie ahead. Evelyn’s thoughts have become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation. Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a German-Jewish prisoner in the internment camp that her husband commands. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn’s and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else.

Longlisted
The Man Booker Prize 2013
Published by
Hamish Hamilton
Publication date
Alison Macleod

Alison Macleod

About the Author

In 1987, aged 22, Alison MacLeod moved from her native Canada to England, supposedly for one year to read for an MA. The moved has proved rather more permanent: she is still here.
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