The Walk Home

Stevie comes from a long line of people who have cut and run.

Just like he has. Stevie's been to London, taught himself to get by, and now he's working as a labourer not so far from his childhood home in Glasgow... But he's not told his family - what's left of them - that he's back. Not yet.

He's also not far from his Uncle Eric's house: another one who left - for love this time. Stevie's toughened himself up against that emotion. And as for his own mother, Lindsey ... well she ran her whole life. From her father and Ireland, from her husband, and eventually from Stevie too.

Moving between Stevie's contemporary Glaswegian life and the story of his parents when they were young, this is a powerful novel about the risk of love, and the madness and betrayals that can split a family. Without your past, who are you? Where does it leave you when you go against your family, turn your back on home; when you defy the world you grew up in? If you cut your ties, will you cut yourself adrift?

Yearning to belong exerts a powerful draw, and Stevie knows there are still two people - his father and his grandmother - waiting for him to walk home.

Rachel Seiffert is an extraordinarily deft and humane writer who tells us the truth about love and about hope.