Ghostly figures under the cliffs

Book club choice Peter Foster enjoys an evocative thriller about trouble in idyllic Jersey

The Return Home by Justin Huggler 295pp, Short, £8.99, ebook £3.99

Late one night Ben sits at the top of the stairs and watches through the bannisters as a haggard man hobbles into the front hall of his quiet Jersey home. The stranger only has one leg and, unlike all the other adults in this boy’s life, he meets his inquisitive nine-year-old gaze without care or kindness.

This is Uncle Jack, who as the narrator of Justin Huggler’s The Return Home recalls, “blew into our sheltered island life on the autumn wind” in 1983. Jack, a foreign correspondent, has come to convalesce after losing a leg to a landmine while covering the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. He is irascible, drinks too much and mutters strangely to himself. He suffers from what we would now call PTSD.

Fast forward to the present day and that boy, now a grown man, returns to Jersey to the bedside of his sick mother – too sick to be burdened by the knowledge that her son’s marriage is now imploding, partly due to his own self-absorption. Plotted with an impressive tautness, the two narratives intertwine to illuminate each other as the adult narrator unpicks what has become of his own life by making sense of Uncle Jack’s earlier torments and battles, which at the time he only dimly understood and processed.

Huggler is from Jersey himself and it shows: this clever and sensitive novel has a tremendous sense of place. Uncle Jack brings a darkness into Ben’s otherwise innocent boyhood, a life of clambering upon abandoned wartime German watchtowers and walking the sheer cliffs of old smugglers’ coves where the “Black Dog of Bouley Bay” lurks and “huge ghost-figures of spray” rise hundreds of feet into the air.

This is a book about a man being forced to grow up, long after he has reached adulthood. It stays with you.