Published by Vintage, 2015, 260 pages.

Lost children: children without an anchor to steady them, to keep them safe. The main characters in this book are adrift and just about manage to survive.

It is the 1950s. The book centres around Monica, a young English woman, the daughter of a schoolteacher. She gives up her studies at Oxford to marry Julius, a Caribbean man she meets there. They have two children, Ben and Tommy. Julius becomes increasingly involved in the politics of his homeland, which is trying to negotiate for independence from Britain. Monica stays home and takes care of their two sons, entertaining herself by looking out of their window at the people in the café opposite.

Eventually, Julius leaves, partly because he is frustrated by Monica’s aimlessness, and she is left to bring up the children on her own. She moves to the north of England and starts work as a librarian. She falls in with the wrong people, fights depression and addiction, while Ben and Tommy are forced to grow up pretty much on their own. They are sent to live with a foster mother, Mrs. Swinson, while Monica tries to sort herself out. That doesn’t really work as Mrs. Swinson is hard on the boys.

Eventually, the boys go back to Monica, but that isn’t much better. She is always tired and does not seem to have the energy to take care of the boys. Ben, as the older child, is the responsible one, and finds it painful to watch his mother struggling to cope. Tommy spends all his free time in football practice. The boys go to summer camp and Ben, as always, fits in but Tommy has a hard time and is bullied.

Soon after they return home, Tommy disappears. The family falls apart. Monica is in and out of clinics, and Ben somehow gets by.

The story is bookended by two chapters on Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In the book, Brontë does not write about his origins, and Caryl Phillips tries to fill in the gap. We meet Heathcliff as a child on the docks, living with his mother, who had come over on a slave ship and is dying. The last chapter, called Going Home, has Mr. Earnshaw taking him to Wuthering Heights. There is a chapter on the Brontës in the middle of the book, on Emily’s illness and death.

This novel is about people who are unmoored or do not fit into the world they live in. Tommy is a talented footballer who does not get a chance; instead, he sees the only thing that is keeping him sane taken away from him. Ben tries to keep his family together, but in the chapters told from his point of view, you can see the toll it is taking on him. Monica has nothing to centre her—she does not get on with her parents, she has no contact with Julius, and her work merely helps to pay the bills.

There are echoes of Wuthering Heights in the book. Monica and the children move to the moors where the book is set, and that’s where Tommy disappears. Heathcliff is a lost child, much like Ben and Tommy—and to a certain extent, Monica.

I’m not sure how the chapter on the Brontës fits in. It is engaging, but it took me away from the main story. You learn more about Emily Brontë’s mental state than Monica’s, although Monica is one of the central characters of this story. Monica is clearly depressed and seems to have trouble dealing with life—and then there is also her sense of rootlessness. But where does this come from? It was already present before she met Julius, so it isn’t caused by her marriage. You never really learn how she dies. There is a lot left to the imagination.

Also, I was curious about where Julius was from. Phillips himself is originally from St. Kitts and Nevis, so I imagine that Julius was too. I would have liked to have known more about him.

Phillips writes well, and you get pulled into the story. He tells it from different points of view—mostly from Monica’s and Ben’s—which fleshes it out. Phillips is also perceptive about human nature and how people get through difficult situations—or don’t.

This is a good read, but also quite depressing. None of the characters really gets a break—except, perhaps, young Heathcliff. And we know how that story ended.