Landfall

For fans of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides", "Landfall" is a clear-eyed, witty and warm debut novel by former "Granta" editor Helen Gordon, that marks the arrival of a major new literary talent. Alice Robinson, art critic for a magazine so fashionable it's just gone out of business, finds herself agreeing to housesit for her parents. Moving back home to a suburbia she thought long behind her, she finds herself reconnecting with a different landscape, a fraught and painful past. For everywhere Alice turns she finds traces of her sister, who went missing as a teenager. Can she stop her old life intruding on the present? Should she even try? What does Alice's new future look like? "An intriguing novel ...a hipster version of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing." ("Metro"). "A memorable novel. I loved the pace and verve of Alice's voyage from Shoreditch to suburbia, and the unexpectedness of the story as it swerves past the familiar into a dangerous and beautiful unknown". (Helen Dunmore). "Compulsively readable". ("Independent on Sunday"). "Fine writing ...wrapped in an arresting evocation of timelessness". ("Guardian"). "Brooding and haunting". ("Tatler"). "Uplifting, witty, wonderfully unsettling". ("Psychologies"). "Beautifully descriptive, with a cliff-hanger finale". ("Easy Living"). Helen Gordon was born in 1979 and grew up in Croydon. She currently lives in east London and is a former associate editor of "Granta" magazine. "Landfall" is her first novel.