Gedney

'A golden trinity on a golden afternoon.' So a newly-bereaved widow describes a painting by her husband, which she hangs in pride of place in her New York apartment. Was it a memory? Where did it happen? Who are the man, woman and child? This has never been clear. Her husband's roots were in Norfolk, and 'Gedney' takes us back in time, through a series of fragments focusing on two couples and two children connected by time, memory and the haunting landscapes of Norfolk and Lincolnshire; and, perhaps, by murder. An eccentric hotel and its owners; a writer with more interest in stories than the people around her; a schoolteacher who shuts herself away from her community; and a mysterious man who hovers around their lives. Come to Gedney with them. Nick Turner's East Anglian novella consists of eleven fragments or short-short stories which together form a whole, but can be read separately. "This novella combines an intense awareness of place with a poetic and truthful understanding of the effect of time on those places. The people Nick Turner gives us to help us realise this are at once evanescent and solidly believable, anchored in their geographical and temporal realities yet, through his art, transcending them. 'Gedney' is a most memorable achievement." Paul Binding, novelist, literary critic and cultural historian.