The Loney
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 16, 2017 12:51 PM | Last Updated: March 16, 2017
Andrew Michael Hurley
When Smith was a boy, he and his family went on a pilgrimage with their local parish to the Loney, a bleak stretch of the English coastline. Tucked into the shore is an ancient shrine, where his mother determined they would find healing for Hanny, Smith's disabled brother. But the Loney is not a place used to visitors, and the locals weren't pleased to welcome them. And when the two brothers became entangled with a glamorous couple staying nearby, they became involved in even more troubling rites. Smith has long carried the burden of what happened in the Loney, but when he hears that the body of a young child has been found during a storm there, he's forced to reckon with his most troubling secrets, no matter the cost. (From Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Loney won the 2015 Costa First Novel Award in January 2016.
From the book
If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney — that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne's shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter.
Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow — a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast — into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint.
From The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley ©2014. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.