The Touch

Description

'An assured and compassionate book' - Independent on Sunday When Donna, Will and Gayle find Frank Chapman lying bruised and battered on the ground on Clapham Common, they feel drawn to help the old man. A connection is forged between the four of them that threatens to upset the careful balance of their lives...

Julie Myerson is the author of Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House and nine novels, including the best-selling Something Might Happen, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the words of the Observer, she 'has a talent for making the unthinkable readable. The results are riveting.'

Myerson is the genuine article * Independent * The second novel is traditionally the testing time for writers. Myerson passes her test with flying colours -- Fay Weldon * Mail on Sunday * An assured and compassionate book... both eccentric and unaffected... Myerson's chosen subjects are illness and power; later, with excitingly conveyed force, suppressed love comes to join them -- Candia McWilliam * Independent on Sunday * Frank is a creation of which Myerson can be proud - originally, absorbingly mad; by turns repulsive and engaging * Times Literary Supplement * Myerson is particularly interesting on the way relationships bend and adjust to fit around illness, on the nature of physical pain and the frightening, exhilarating prospect of freedom from it. She explores the meaning of miracles and the terrifying impotence of reason against rant. Myerson does all this with few words and scant detail, and yet her novel reverberates around the mind long after one has finished reading it * Scotsman *