Adam's Peak

Runner-up for the 2008 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize On a stifling August day, six-year-old Clare Fraser and seven-year-old Rudy Vantwest make eye contact from opposite sides of their street. For an instant they are connected, then each turns away Clare to the shelter of the garden sprinkler, Rudy to the excitement of his brother’s impending birth. Twenty-five years later, Clare and Rudy, strangers living continents apart, fixtures of each others memories and imaginations, are connected again. Overturning the guarded, insular lives they both lead, two events one an accident, the other an act of terror transform them both and bind the Vantwest and Fraser families irrevocably. Adam’s Peak weaves back and forth between a Montreal suburb and a Colombo private school, between a Ceylon tea estate at the end of the Second World War and a small Scottish town in the early 1960s, its characters struggling desperately to come to terms with themselves and with their powerful connections to the people and places they have tried to escape.