Later, further west, the “sky is a blue wash. “We travelled in a wash of southern light that filled the car and seemed to push at and past the edges of the world,” he writes early on. He close-reads the landscape like a poem. It’s a charming if well-trodden narrative path, redeemed from the commonplace by the flair Cunnell exhibits in his descriptions of the South Downs. My small hands turn to fists when I hear the word: Dad.” The boys’ mother moves to her parents’ in Eastbourne, where Howard and Luke grow up in a familiar muddle of art, literature, music and provincial violence. The young Howard finds that he’s “terrified by how badly somebody that doesn’t exist can make me feel. Jason Cunnell is a chancer and a fly-by-night who walks out on Howard and his brother, Luke, before Howard is born. This is a book of two halves, the first dominated by an absence – that of Cunnell’s own father.
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