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East Fortune
Ten years ago a friend of mine was driving home in Scotland when a student stepped out into the road in front of him. This wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate and it was suicide.
There was nothing my friend could do to stop this. The boy died. My friend went to the funeral and met the boy’s parents. They told him that he couldn’t possibly be to blame.
And yet…
This is the starting point of East Fortune, a novel which takes this situation and imagines what happens next; and, in particular, the meeting between the driver of the car and the student’s girlfriend. It is, in effect, a love triangle in which one of the characters is dead.
The novel begins with death but it ends with love; and, in the middle, I have tried to say something about family life. Families with sibling rivalries which are never quite expressed, families where sons are still treated as children by their parents - even if they are fifty years old; families in which things haven’t always turned out as people had either hoped or expected; families in which children are embarrassed by their parents but unsure what to make of their lives; families with secrets that some members know and others don’t; families where the same jokes are recycled every birthday and every Christmas.
And so, essentially, it’s about love, death and family life – with all the complexities and vulnerabilities that come with being with the people that know you best.
The idea of 'home' and what it means is crucial; whether it's a building, a state of mind, or the person that you are with.
In order to think more about this, I visited several homes and thought very hard about the setting of the novel. You can find out more about this under 'Inspiration'.
Here's an extract, to give you an idea of the tone and feel, read by the fabulous Bill Paterson: