The Outcast

One summer’s day in 1957, nineteen-year-old Lewis Aldridge stands alone at Waterford railway station. The only person awaiting his return is a fifteen-year-old girl called Kit Garmichael. Like him, she endured a childhood spent in the stifling atmosphere of an English village recovering from the ravages of the Second World War.

A decade carlier it was Lewis who waited for his father’s homecoming from the war. His mother, a free-spirited and glamorous woman, holds husband and son in her thrall. But when tragedy strikes, Lewis and his father, unable to console one another, are torn apart by their grief.

Now, from the fractured remains of their old lives, Kit and Lewis must forge their own futures. As menacing as it is beautiful, The Outcast is a devastating portrait of transgression and redemption from an astonishing new voice.