Some Here Among Us

Description

It is 1967, and as America's allies hesitate over whether to send more troops to Vietnam and the strains of 'All You Need is Love' echo from Abbey Road, students take to the streets of Wellington, New Zealand, to protest the war. Among them are Race, Candy, Chadwick and FitzGerald and their elusive, electrifying friend Morgan Tawhai. They are young and hopeful and the world is all before them. Forty years later, in Washington DC, Race's son Toby is navigating his own path across a landscape still trembling with the reverberations of 9/11. Uncertain whether love is really all he needs, Toby, along with his girlfriend JoJo, watches the centuries-old fragments of a comet fall across the sky while America secretly begins planning to invade Iraq. As Race and his companions move through the first decade of the new millennium, their friendships tested and pulled apart and reconfigured anew, they come to discover that Morgan - who burned as brightly as any comet, who could quote Shakespeare and Sterne, The Iliad and Bob Dylan, and who will forever remain the twenty-year-old they once knew - is both the mystery and the touchstone of their lives. From the shores of New Zealand to the political heart of Washington and to the hills above Beirut, Some Here Among Us is a stunning meditation on youth and promise and loss. It is a novel for our times.

Peter Walker is a New Zealander who has lived in London since 1986. He worked for seven years on the Independent and three on the Independent on Sunday where he was Foreign Editor. He has also written for the Financial Times and Granta. His first book, The Fox Boy, was published by Bloomsbury in 2001 and was widely praised.

Shifts in chronology are handled deftly, and Walker is adept at suffusing each episode with the atmosphere of its particular historical moment without allowing events to occlude the book's personae ... Rather, it is made artfully to intersect with the lives and concerns of Walker's characters ... Walker's exploration of these themes can produce some compelling, memorable and beautiful writing * National * A coming-of-age novel about two generations living through personal and political upheaval of the Vietnam and Iraq wars * Red * A mesmerising tale ... Ultimately a coming-of-age story set across two generations of political upheavals, beautifully portraying the lost idealism of youth * Image Magazine * A beautiful novel about the loss of innocence, the ineffable passing of time and the inescapable weight of the past * Mail on Sunday * An absorbing and ethereal meditation into the ways in which the passage of time opens us up to the mysterious currents that lie behind all worldly concerns * Independent on Sunday * Politics, history, love and sex swirl through the plot ... There's much to enjoy and admire: Walker's confidently roving point of view, his excellent dialogue and his talent for bringing relationship strikingly to life ***** * The Lady * Ambitious ... Extraordinary ... New York's art deco sheen is deftly evoked * Daily Telegraph *