Gluttonous Animals

She is the cleaner's daughter. He is the heir to the house she helps her mother scrub on Saturdays. In the autumn of 1982, on the edge of the North York Moors, eighteen-year-old Lainey Farrow and Sebastian Herne fall into the kind of love that, in another life, in another house, might have lasted.

It does not last. By spring, Sebastian has been quietly engaged to a girl from his own world, and Lainey has walked off the estate carrying everything she will not say.

Thirty years later, she is still in Middlesbrough, still cleaning, when Sebastian returns to Thornwell to turn the failing estate into a living museum. Lainey is on the staff. The years between them have done what years do - to her, to him, to her mother. What they were to each other was never finished. What they might still be to each other has waited the better part of forty years to ask.

Gluttonous Animals is a novel about class, consent, ambition, and the long argument a body has with its own history. It moves between an English country estate and the terraced streets of Middlesbrough; between schoolrooms and seminar rooms, the Highland coast and a small flat in Canterbury where a woman in her fifties begins, at last, to write what she thinks. It is a love story that refuses to lie about either love or class - and a study of two people learning, late, what it means to be known.

For readers of David Nicholls' One Day, Maggie O'Farrell's This Must Be the Place, and Tessa Hadley's The Past.