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Revenant

UK Publisher: Picador

In a remote Welsh village by the sea, four friends grow up together. Plain but charismatic Del is the ringleader, unstoppable, supremely confident in her ability to get her own way. Neil, shy and stuttering, and Ricky, full of rage and loneliness, are misfits at school until Del takes them under her wing. Steph is the outsider – pretty, posh, sent to a different school – but she too is mesmerized by Del’s devil-may-care approach to life. They hang around together – mucking about in the woods, searching for treasure on the seashore, doing dares, sharing cigarettes. Then, one terrible day, stubborn, confident, fearless Del rows out to sea alone and is drowned.

Meeting ten years later in the now decaying, stagnating village, Neil, Ricky and Steph revisit their childhood haunts and re-live the memories that have cast a shadow over each of their lives. Del is, by turns, the beating heart at the centre of all their stories and a gaping, wrenching absence.

Set against the backdrop of the northern Welsh coast, and told through the captivating, shifting voices of Neil, Ricky and Steph – the children left behind – “Revenant” pieces together their memories of childhoods broken by desertion.

 

Tristan Hughes was born in Atikokan, Canada and brought up around Llangoed, Ynys Mon where he currently lives. He completed a...