'Perhaps happiness and sadness just shade into each other and what really matters is the intensity of the feeling?' wonders Andrea, happily disoriented by first love while nursing the apparently decrepit residents of a north London care home . . . While her matron fights with sailors and her deputy drinks to remember of forget, the two oldest residents knit out and unravel their strange destinies. The days speed up and slow down; time stretches and snaps. It's the entirely intense summer of 1976, that sees Blue Oyster Cult and Supertramp superseded by Patti Smith and the Stranglers . . . And as the heat inexorably rises inside and outside the Roundhouse, the lives of young and old alike are about to blister and burn.

Author Biography

BILL BROADY is the author of the novella Swimmer (Flamingo, 2000) and In This Block There Lives a Slag (Flamingo, 2001) which won the 2002 Macmillan Silver Pen Award for short stories. This is his first novel