Author(s): Tim Binding

Fiction

In 1952, in London's last great fog, a small boy, Henry Armstrong, is separated from his mother. Thirty years later, as a bandsman in the Royal Marines and bound for the Falklands, he still has not found her.

Meanwhile, the life of Henry's childhood friend, shoe salesman Richard Roach, is in crisis. He is missing all of his targets; his feckless and impotent teenage son despises him; and his wife, Ellen, no longer bothers to mask her indifference when he returns each night to their home at the end of Anglefield Road. Richard wants to make things better somehow, but he has little idea where to begin. Richard's neighbour, Suzanne Plimsoll, on the other hand, just wants out: out of her marriage, out of the accusing stares of her stepdaughter, out most of all of Anglefield Road.

For her, real life only exists onboard the ocean liner on which she works, her beloved Canberra. When the ship is requisitioned to transport troops to the Falklands and she volunteers to go along, she finally glimpses a means of escape. Freddie Millen's difficulties run, perhaps, less deep. Still, his obsession with lawns has caused no small measure of strain to his marriage . . .

Anthem is a novel fearless in the scale of its ambition, as the lives of four families are changed and in some cases overturned by a dispute over a group of small, barren islands at the bottom of the world. It is a heartrending, also at times surprisingly amusing, story of the horrors of war - at home and abroad - and, finally, of a long delayed reunion that takes place in the most surprising of circumstances.