As menacing as it is beautiful, THE OUTCAST is a devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy from an astonishing new voice poised for international recognition.
It’s 1957 and Lewis Aldridge is travelling back to his home in the South of England. He is straight out of jail and nineteen years old. His return will trigger the implosion not just of his family, but of a whole community.
A decade earlier, his father’s homecoming casts a different shape. The war is over and Gilbert reverts easily to suburban life—cocktails at six-thirty, church on Sundays—but his wife and young son resist the stuffy routine. Lewis and his mother escape to the woods for picnics, just as they did in wartime days. Nobody is surprised that Gilbert’s wife counters convention, but they are all shocked when, after one of their jaunts, Lewis comes back without her.
Not far away, Kit Carmichael keeps watch. She has always understood more than most, not least from what she is dealt by her own father’s hand. Lewis’s grief and burgeoning rage are all too plain, and Kit makes a private vow to help. But in her attempts to set them both free, she fails to predict the painful and horrifying secrets that must first be forced into the open.
THE OUTCAST is an unforgettable story of transgression and redemption from a powerful new writer.
After a two-year stint in prison, Lewis Aldridge finds himself on the long road home, literally and metaphorically. Kate Reading matches the tone of this book perfectly, dramatizing the dark outlook and quiet demeanor of both Lewis and his father as they try to piece together a relationship despite the difficulties of the past and the present. As events unfold at a snail's pace, Reading's rhythm complements Lewis's excruciating inner pain, both real and imagined. Lewis's path to redemption is interrupted by a romantic attraction and involvement with a prominent family. This is a dramatically read character study set in post-WWII suburban London. D.L.M. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
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