Winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize
From the Publisher

From the award-winning author of The Untouchable ("Contemporary fiction gets no better than this."--Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review), an elegiac, deeply moving, and eminently accessible novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.
The voice we hear is that of Max, a middle-aged Englishman, a writer and self-described dilettante who has been supported by his wife's money. Now, after his wife's recent death, Max has gone back to the seaside town where he lived as a child--a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his new life without her, and a return to the place where he encountered the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time.
In a narrative that moves seamlessly back and forth in time, Max relives the childhood summer he met the Graces, a well-healed vacationing family who took him in and unwittingly introduced him to a world of feeling he'd never experienced before. The seductive mother, the imperious father, the twins Chloe and Myles--in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled--each of them played a part in what Max still remembers as the "barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood."

Contemporary Writers