A Long Way Down (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781835639955)

In a chance encounter on a high bridge, Preston Prendergast meets Caroline Lassiter. Preston is about to go home; Caroline is about to jump. This kindly, persuasive man encourages a woman with a tragically burdensome past to step to safety and join him in a search for a new identity. But Caroline is not alone in seeking refuge from confusion. Preston, recently pressured into retirement, faces an uncertain future, disorientated by the prospect of an unfamiliar and unwanted freedom. Two people of wildly disparate ages now find a strange, improbable comfort in an unexpected friendship. In this difficult alliance, who is the rescuer, and who the rescued? The trauma on the bridge has not been resolved. It is only just beginning. In a series of disturbing incidents, often bizarre, sometimes absurd, these two dysfunctional lives are gradually but inexorably derailed, until we are left to contemplate the insidious nature of vulnerability and obsession. In an almost ethereal final scene, Preston and Caroline poised between earth and sky, there is a tantalising moment of hope. A moment of perhaps.

Perhaps, in life and on the edge of life, we can never be sure.