From the highly acclaimed author of The Panopticon and one of Granta's Best Young British Writers comes the new novel THE SUNLIGHT PILGRIMS.
Set in a Scottish caravan park during a freak winter – it is snowing in
Jerusalem, the Thames is overflowing, and an iceberg separated from the
Fjords in Norway is expected to arrive off the coast of Scotland – The Sunlight Pilgrims tells the story of a small Scottish community living through what
people have begun to think is the end of times. Bodies are found frozen
in the street with their eyes open, midst economic collapse, schooling
and health care are run primarily on a voluntary basis. Dylan, a refugee from panic-stricken London who is grieving for his mother and his
grandmother, arrives in the caravan park in the middle of the night – to begin his life anew. Under the lights of the aurora borealis, he is
drawn to his neighbour Constance, a woman who is known for having two
lovers, her eleven-year old daughter Stella, who is struggling to
navigate changes in her own life, and elderly Barnacle, so crippled that he walks facing the earth. But as the temperature drops, daily life
carries on: people get out of bed, they make a cup of tea, they fall in love, they complicate.
The Sunlight Pilgrims, the thrilling follow-up to The Panopticon, is a humane, sad, funny, shimmeringly odd and beautiful novel about
absence, about the unknowability of mothers. It is a story about people
in extreme circumstances finding one another, and finding themselves.
