Meeting the English

It's the searing hot summer of 1989 and revolution is in the air - though not just for the Prys family... In 1989, the year of news, as London bakes through the hottest summer anyone can remember, one family is embroiled in its own private cataclysm. Phillip Prys has been silenced by a sudden, massive stroke. As his girlish third wife, Shirin, pads through their faded rooms, dignified in the face of bustling Myfanwy, back to manage her former husband's care, their adolescent children, Jake and Celia, seek refuge in drugs and food. Enter Struan. Built like a heron, fresh from Scotland, he is thrust - quite literally - into the bosom of the family, as Phillip's seventeen-year-old nurse. He's had experience of death, but not of London. Hampstead is a foreign country, with foreign food and foreign customs. But he finds that it also has a strange kind of magic. Under the influence of each Prys in turn, his life begins to alter in ways he could never have imagined. And so, in the meantime, do theirs... Meeting the English is the first novel from acclaimed poet, playwright and story-writer Kate Clanchy. Fresh, funny, acute and tender, it shows a world on the brink of change - and a family on the brink of something like redemption.