The book introduces us to Alice Lake, who lives in a village in East Yorkshire, Ridinghouse Bay.
She moved here six years ago, and she has three children by different fathers: Jasmine (16), Kai (14) and Romaine (6). Her occupation is to make art with old maps. She is single, and apart from looking after her children, she keeps watching the webcam because her parents both have dementia.
One day before leaving to pick up Romaine from school, she sees a man, sitting on the beach, staring intently at the sea. It starts to rain, and as some years ago she saw a man walking into the sea and drown, Alice decides to go and at least take the man a coat left by the previous lodger in the cottage. The man accepts the coat, but his answers are strange as he seems not to know how he came to the village. Alice picks up Romaine, and then she sees that the man is still there, so she goes to talk to him again. The man says that he doesn't even remember anything, andhe concludes that he has lost his memory but he is not injured. Alice invites him to stay in his shed that night and that night she and her children eat pizza with him, and Romaine says that they can call him Frank.
The only friend that Alice has in the village, Derry, tells her not to get involved, and it seems that Alice had problems in the past, maybe involving a man and the custody of the children. Yet, she turns a deaf ear to her, and she becomes drawn to this man.
At the same time Lily, a young woman, calls the police that her husband, Carl, is missing. He was supposed to have returned home from work, but he never turned up. Lily is from Ukraine, and that is where she met Carl. They met a couple of months ago, and they married a few weeks ago. Lily doesn't know much about Carl's life, and she vaguely remembers that her mother lives in a town starting with S and he has a sister who may be called Susan or Susanne. Lily is very worried, and the policewoman, Beverly, agrees to investigate. Then when Beverly calls her again, she tells her that they have checked his passport, and they have discovered that the passport is false and there is no one called Carl Monrose, which means that Carl has been lying to her all this time and she doesn't even know his real name. I imagine that Carl is Lily's husband, but why has he lost his memory? And why did he have to give a fake name to Lily?
Apart from these perspectives, the novel takes us back in time. It is 1993, and Gray, a seventeen-year-old boy, travels to Ridinghouse Bay, with his parents and his fourteen-year-old siser, Kirsty, as they spend every summer there. Gray is not happy with these plans. When he and Kirsty go for a walk and buy some sweets, a young man notices Kirsty, who is very beautiful and attractive. Gray and his parents notice that there is a young man who they see around and is clearly interested in Kirsty. Then one day at the beach the man approaches them. He introduces himself as Mark Tate. He is nineteen and is in the village with his aunt, Kitty, who has lost her husband recently. Mark points at the house at the distance which is a big house, and Gray's parents are impressed. Then the young man invites them to come to tea, and they accept, and they meet the aunt. Gray doesn't know why, but he doesn't trust Mark. It is obvious that Kirsty is delighted to have this young man's attention, but Gray doesn't like it.
This events in 1993 must have something to do with the missing man. I imagine that Gray is Carl/Frank because he has told Alice that he has remembered a young woman with long, dark hair riding a horse in a carousel. But why is this connected to losing his memory or using a fake name?
No comments:
Post a Comment