Breaking Light

Steeped in its bleak and beautiful landscape, Mortford is a place of secrets and of bitter divisions and shattered dreams. Returning to this Dartmoor village where he grew up, Gabriel attempts to come to terms with what he lost as a boy so long ago.

Slowly the mysteries hidden in this small community on the edge of the moors begin to unravel. But one of Gabriel’s memories remains sharper than all the that of his boyhood friend Michael, the tenderness of their first summers and the violent betrayal that destroyed it.

And, intruding on his self-enforced isolation, the beautiful Mrs Sarobi, meddling Doris Ludgate and the frightful spectre of Jim of Blackaton will become bound in with Gabriel’s search for acceptance and the possibility of love.

In her striking, lyrical prose, Karin Altenberg imagines what it is to be incomplete. Set in this haunted landscape, a mesmerising tale is told of the ways in which something once broken in two may, finally, be made whole.

Karin Altenberg was born in Sweden and moved to Britain to study in 1996. She holds a PhD in Archaeology. Her first, bestselling novel, Island of Wings, was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award and the Scottish Book of the Year Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.