The Boy at the Shore

Duncan Ross grew up in a raw new town west of Edinburgh, built wrong for people, as he would come to think of it, and right for nearly everything else: a boy nobody quite had the words for, in a house and a school and a country that did not have them either. He would spend fifty years being useful and silent, the reliable one, the son, then the husband, then the father, who needed nothing and gave nothing away.

Moving between a childhood in Livingston and the long, ordinary decades that follow it, at a harbour, in a marriage, at more than one graveside, The Boy at the Shore is one man's account of what he was given, what was taken from him, and, in the silences neither he nor his family ever found the words for, what he chose to make up instead.

One man, two daughters, and the son he made up: a quiet, exacting novel about memory, autism found fifty years too late, and the cost of a lifetime spent being no trouble at all.