The Incident

'Certainly there are ghosts in these towers. For me they are the ghosts of two children. And even now - ten years later and seven hundred miles away - I still wake most nights with the muffled echo of their cries in my ears and the weight of their deaths on my conscience...'

Three lives; three turning points. Craig was a teenage lifeguard on a beach in Germany when two children died on his watch. It should never have happened. He was an expert swimmer. His grandfather, Gordon McInnes was on board a ship torpedoed during the war. He survived by clinging to the body of one of his colleagues. Years later, he met one of the crew of the U boat that attacked his ship. Gerd is a refugee of the Cold War. Recruited by the Stasi at a very young age, he escaped to the west after his mission went terribly wrong. He never went back. The Incident is a searingly powerful novel about fate; about those moments that change the course of a life forever. It is also a book about history, from the Second World war through to the current day, and the way incidents long past can have reverberate across generations.

Kenneth Macleod was born in Glasgow in 1972. He began working as a newspaper reporter at the age of seventeen then worked in the Scottish media for twelve years, before completing a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He divides his time between Glasgow and Berlin, where he works as a tour guide. THE INCIDENT is his first novel.