Perfect Paperback by Rachel Joyce

Product Details

• Publisher: Anchor Canada (2017-09-19)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 400 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780385677745
• Item Weight: 353.81 grams
• Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.2 x 1.0 cm

From the author of the international bestseller, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, comes another exquisite and emotionally resonant novel about the search for the truth and unconditional love.

On a foggy spring morning in 1972, twelve-year-old Byron Hemming and his mother are driving to school in the English countryside. On the way, in a life-changing two seconds, an accident occurs. Or does it? Byron is sure it happened, but his mother, sitting right next to him in the car, has no reaction to it. Over the course of the days and weeks that follow, Byron embarks on a journey to discover what really happened—or didn't—that fateful morning when everything changed.

It is a journey that will take him—a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy with a loveable and cloistered twelve-year-old boy's perspective on life—into the murkier, more difficult realities of the adult world, where people lie, fathers and mothers fight without words and even unwilling boys must become men. Byron will have to reconcile the dueling realities of that summer, a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit and the power of compassion.

About the Author

RACHEL JOYCE is the author of the novels The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Perfect, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, The Music Shop and Miss Benson's Beetle, as well as the digital short story A Faraway Smell of Lemon and a story collection, A Snow Garden & Other Stories. Her books have been translated into thirty-six languages and two are in development for film. Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Joyce was named the Specsavers National Book Awards "New Writer of the Year" in 2012 and shortlisted for "UK Author of the Year" in 2014. Joyce has also written more than thirty original afternoon plays and adaptions of the classics for BBC Radio 4, including all the Brontë novels. She moved to writing after a long career as an actor, performing leading roles for the RSC, the National Theatre and Cheek by Jowl. She lives with her family in Gloucestershire.