Summer Of The Cicada

'A new, dark and disturbing voice' - Bernard MacLaverty

Like To Kill a Mockingbird rewritten from the viewpoint of Boo Radley

Supremely well imagined...Frequently brilliant and consistently unsettling, Summer of the Cicada will remain with you for quite a while

The opening scene of Summer of the Cicada lodges itself in the mind and stays there until the final page... the ferocity of the violence, combined with the matter-of-fact way the scene unfolds, leaves an unforgettble impression... It is a measure of the artistry Will Napier brings to his first novel that the harrowing subject matter does not make for a depressing read

Will Napier has split his adult life between Scotland and America. He now resides in Atlantic Beach, Florida with his wife and four children. His second novel, Without Warning, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. He is writing his third novel and completing a collection of short fiction.

It's 1987 and Joseph Pullman and his parents have just moved to Maritime, Maryland. This is white-picket-fence America, but for fifteen-year-old Joseph the threat of violence at home is as unrelenting as the punishment he receives at school, and his mother is slowly slipping away from reality. 
 
Joseph forms an uneasy friendship with the awkward Dean Gillespie and the boys occupy themselves burying animal corpses at the Killing Tree. This is the summer the cicadas are due to come out of their seventeen-year hibernation and Joseph becomes convinced that their arrival will bring his salvation. Meanwhile, Mother is gone and Joseph's father has retreated to his basement workshop. 
 
When a local boy goes missing and is finally found unconscious in the woods, Maritime is shaken. Then a second boy disappears and the residents of the town are forced to confront the secrets of the Pullmans' house.

Will Napier

On the surface Joseph Pullman seems to have left his unhappy childhood far behind: as the town undertaker and a council member, he is now a respected citizen of Henderson, Maryland. But Joe's father is in jail for the brutal murder of a young boy and despite his wife's questions, Joe can't - or won't - talk about his past. 
 
When his wife disappears, and a woman's severed hand is found inside a glove, Joe decides it's finally time to confront his past. Only to discover that his past has beaten him to it...

Will Napier

Without Warning

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