Things We Lose in Waves

LoveReading Says

Suspenseful, incisively observed, and sizzling with long held secrets, Lucy Ayrton’s Things We Lose in Waves brilliantly evokes the dislocation that comes of leaving your hometown, and the strange unease of fleeting returns.

In this case, though, Jenny, a young lawyer, is compelled to return for longer. Her father, owner of the village’s sole pub, dies just as COVID takes hold in Britain. Rather than return to furlough life in Hackney, she decides to stay in “weird, brash, windswept” Ravenspurn, a northern village that’s in the process of being lost to the sea as the coast is eroded. Not happy about the prospect of spending “three whole weeks with just her mum, the seagulls and the sea” (of course, lockdown continues for much longer), Jenny feels ill at ease in her childhood home, with its “mainly closed-up shops, like knocked-out teeth in the smile of the street.”

There are palpable strains between mother and daughter, and barbed animosity between Jenny and Alex, her friend from childhood. A second timeline shifts to 2004, when Jenny and Alex both planned to leave Ravenspurn for university.

At one point, Alex remarks, “They get into your skin, don’t they? The people you grow up with,” and Things We Lose in Waves reveals that with potency. Also tingling with the tension of complex family dynamics and friendship, and the swell of secrets, this is a richly resonant novel of our time.

Joanne Owen

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