Blake Morrison

Non-fiction Award Winner. Author's memoirs of his father told in a tender, funny and powerfully written observation.

Ian and Em travel to East Anglia for a weekend by the sea. Their hosts Ollie and Daisy couldn't be more welcoming. But dangerous tensions quickly emerge in the stifling atmosphere of the cottage. Ominous revelations from Ian's past slowly intrude, and his rivalry with Ollie intensifies as they resurrect a seemingly forgotten bet made twenty years before...

Blake Morrison only really got to know his mother after she died. He knew she was a doctor trained in Ireland, but he didn't know she had been Agnes O'Shea, from a large Roman Catholic family. How Agnes became Kim, he discovered when he found papers and letters after her death.