Delacorte Press
December 2013
On Sale: November 26, 2013
352 pages ISBN: 0385342764 EAN: 9780385342766 Kindle: B00D5BEDNQ Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
For thirty years, Howard and Deborah Morgan have poured all their energy and modest savings into Stoneyridge, a smallholding deep in the English moors. Howard putters with pottery, Deborah dabbles in weaving, and both struggle to tend sheep and chickens and live off the land. But what began with simple dreams of solitude and sunlit picnics in the hills has given way to a harsher reality.
To help with finances, they decide to turn Stoneyridge into a bed-and-breakfast. But a sudden stroke leaves Howard incapacitated and Deborah overwhelmed. Howardβs world, once so limitless, has shrunk to the confines of their crumbling house; Deborahβs main joy now comes in the form of a brief weekly email from their successful son, who lives abroad.
Then, late one evening, two men arrive needing a room for the nightβand set off a chain of events that uncovers the relics of old tragedies. New wounds are cut deep, betrayals and cruelties intermix with tenderness and love. And through it all, Stoneyridge quietly hides the bitter and transformative truth.
Evocative, intimately claustrophobic, and psychologically complex, Our Picnics in the Sun is a novel of stunning prose and knife-sharp insight. Morag Joss crafts a modern masterpiece of rising tension that binds and releases like a beating heart, propelling readers to a final page that resonates and haunts.
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