Summerland

The most pleasurable read you'll have this year - a lead fiction title for Picador. Every year since they can remember two couples have spent their holidays on the sun-drenched shores of Palm Beach. ending each day in the dusky half-light of summer afternoons sipping Vermouth, overseeing their domain. They are truly society's golden ones. There is Hugh Bowman Junior, heir to his father's vast farming business, handsome, fool-hardy and self obsessed his wife Helen, his equal in everything apart from luck; Pup, only daughter of the martini-drinking Greenups, and her husband Richard, our narrator, capable, he says, of gilding his own family history from time to time. Richard, now a hollowed-out man remembers his paradise, their immaculate lives and the tales of infidelity and ultimate tragedy that can exist only between the most intimate of friends. And, as Richard loses himself in his reminiscences, we begin to wonder whether he is reliving a lost paradise or actually reinventing it. Malcolm Knox's witty and riveting debut is in the tradition of the best story tellers. You'll be seduced from page one.