Larkin's Promise

by C.J. Havelock

Thomas Harper is a nurse whose cowardice is only matched by his enormous capacity for self-loathing and guilt. He ends up separated from his children after a pathetic attempt at an affair and the disintegration of his marriage. Hard as he strives to maintain contact with them over the next several years his ex-wife, embittered by events and aided by her parents, frustrates his every attempt until, eventually, all communication is severed and all is lost. Or so it seems until Tom, bereft and despairing, receives what he believes are hidden messages from his children. He then embarks on his own personal odyssey, as he exists beneath the radar of normal life, hunting in the strange hours and the unfrequented places for the next message, the pursuit of which becomes his sole purpose and the reason for him to maintain his struggle against the demons in his head. Then, one summer afternoon, disaster strikes, threatening the fabric of Tom’s world and bringing him face-to-face with the circumstances of his own childhood. This is a story of painful self-discovery, failure, loss and redemption. It considers what it is to be a parent and the myriad ways in which we can fail in our endeavour to be a good one. Whilst it looks into the dark recesses of the mind, it does so with humour and humanity.

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 14, 2014

Reviews

[Lindsay · Rating 1 out of 5]

** MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE, DEATH, SELF HARM **

The entirety of this book is the characters self narration with maybe 20 lines total of dialogue.

The vocabulary is verbose, sesquipedalian, and grandiloquent. [Like what I did there lol]

There's no plot, the timeline is impossible to follow, and the ending is painful.