Sarah Winman

"This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that. Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more. But then we fast-forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married...

Cornwall, 1947. Marvellous Ways is a 90-year-old woman who has lived alone in a remote creek for nearly all her life. Recently she has taken to spending her days sitting on a mooring stone by the river with a telescope. She is waiting for something, she is not sure what, but she'll know it when she sees it. Drake is a young soldier left reeling by the war. He's agreed to fulfil a dying man's last wish and hand-deliver a letter to the man's father...