Something to Expiate

Peter Newton is a very ordinary man on the verge of middle age heading home for family tea on a very ordinary Saturday afternoon. But when he encounters his boyhood love in the middle of the High Street, his life is headed for quite a few extraordinary twists and turns.This book tells of a time in which surprisingly little had changed since the days of Romeo and Juliet, yet is still within living memory. There have been many novels of the hard years of the 20s and 30s, of the rigours and dangers of the war years, or of the wild outburst of illusory freedom of the 60s and 70s. But the decade in which the first cracks of change appeared, the 50s, has barely been touched. 'Something to Expiate' tells of that decade.It does so not as some dry historical text, or some unapproachable piece of pseudo-literary pretension, but as the tender love story of two 17-year-olds overwhelmed by the first rush of passion, yet too innocent to know how to handle it. It is also a tough love story because the times were not sympathetic to young people, and because it is told by the boy, angry at the way life is already forcing him into paths he does not want to follow, and inexorably separating him from his love.Even very ordinary, middle-aged family men can have extraordinary stories to tell.