The Secret Things

'My memories of my mother are few and fragile. That is perhaps unsurprising, given that it is now almost fifty years since she died. I was eight at the time. Whenever I think of her, as I often do, even now, the two of us together, happy as only a mother and child can be happy, I am reminded of just how traversable the border is between memory and fantasy.'

Gabriel Satterthwaite has lived much of his life in the shadow of his mother's apparent suicide by drowning, close to the family home, when he was eight years old. Ever since that traumatic event, he has found himself unable to establish lasting relationships, or to pursue a career that would match up to his father’s expectations. When his father, now suffering from dementia, appears to confess to having murdered Gabriel's mother, the son embarks on a quest to discover what really happened to her all those years ago. That quest leads him to a small town in northern France, to Tel Aviv, to New York, and ultimately to a run-down seaside town in East Kent in search of a truth that will compel him to change not only his long-cherished image of his mother, but his sense of his own identity.