Summer's Lease

The debut novel from award-winning poet Sara Clark, Summer's Lease is a darkly comic meditation on mortality, loss, and the passage of time. When Alex Warren, a lifelong hermit, is forced to sell his old family home, he takes one final trip around the property, remembering his life as it has been, and particularly his confused relationship with his now-deceased parents, Bill and Margaret. As his recollections turn again and again to one particular incident in his life, he revisits in his mind the picaresque events of that single day of freedom in his youth, an adventure which had taken him from the rural depths of Suffolk to the council estates of Ipswich in pursuit of only one thing - love. Equal parts Don Quixote and A Confederacy of Dunces, Summer's Lease is a lyrical and hilarious parable of sentimentalism and self-discovery by one of Scotland's most promising young novelists.