Larchfield

Polly Clark Riverrun €17.99

The lives of two lonely poets become entangled on the remote west coast of Scotland. In 1930, young WH Auden, fleeing a doomed engagement that he’d hoped might have helped to suppress his homosexuality, takes a teaching job at Larchfield, a private boys’ school. Decades after his death, a poet named Dora moves nearby with her architect husband and gives birth to a premature baby. Marooned by new motherhood and oppressed by awful neighbours, Dora begins communing with Auden – and imperilling her own sanity in the process. An engrossing and impeccably told story of isolation and creativity, which is as involving as a thriller.