Author(s): Caryl Phillips

Contemporary Fiction

From award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips, a heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past

It is the 1960s. Isolated from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, Monica Johnson raises her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors. But when her younger son Tommy, a loner who is bullied at school, disappears, the family bond is demolished - with devastating consequences.

Deftly intertwined with this modern narrative is the story of the ragged childhood of Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys. Recovering the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, The Lost Childis an exquisite novel about exile, freedom and what it is to belong.