BEST BOOKS ON... ESCAPE
I WANT to break free, run for the hills or sail off through night and day. It is the incessant noise of it all.
Every day a new drama or trauma, and a Prime Minister armoured in ever bigger necklaces, as if trying to invoke talismanic powers.
Even the weather went stark raving mad last week.
From glowering skies, a belligerent Storm Gareth hurled abuse, strafing shorelines, lashing out at anything in its path, then showing psycho glimmers of sunniness.
In between increasingly urgent news bulletins and doom weather watching, I spent what downtime I had looking at Scottish holiday rentals online, half wondering if any might double up as a bunker should order break down.
I asked my parents if things had felt worse in the Seventies. But they had fled abroad to work by the Winter of Discontent, possibly spurred by my trilling Happy Birthday every time the lights went out. Claire Fuller’s gripping, chillingly atmospheric Our Endless Numbered Days is set during that politically tumultuous period. In 1985, in London, teenage Peggy discovers a forgotten photograph of her father James: ‘He didn’t look like a liar.’
Then the action spools back to 1976, when James, a survivalist, abducts nine-year-old Peggy, taking her to a remote hut in the German forest, after explaining they are humanity’s sole survivors. In this Grimm fairy tale setting, who will leave a breadcrumb trail for its child heroine?
There are more children in peril and terrifying situations to escape, in Maile Meloy’s heart-jolting Do Not Be Alarmed, in which two American families embark on a cruise of Central America that goes horrendously wrong.
Theirs is not a tale of derring-do I would ever want to be part of, but David Balfour’s Jacobean misadventure in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is. No writer evokes the tumult of the Atlantic or the stark majesty of the Highlands so vividly.
It is transporting fiction: pacey, but also breathtakingly assured as nature writing. I was yearning to run to the hills, and Stevenson takes me there.