Four teenagers – Lucy, Mike, Joe, and the elusive Liv – first meet as inpatients in a psychiatric unit in Birmingham. When they leave, they scatter back to their separate lives in rural Herefordshire and beyond, carrying with them the fragile bonds formed in that strange, suspended time.
Say That You’ll See Me Again follows what becomes of them. Told through a polyphony of voices – Lucy’s journal letters addressed to the absent Liv, Mike’s restless and darkly funny interior monologue, and a series of lyrical passages that open out the novel’s emotional world across generations – it is a book about the aftermath of crisis: the grinding difficulty of provincial life, the longing for connection, and the way certain friendships mark us permanently, whether or not they survive.
Barney Norris writes about young people in extremis with a moral seriousness and formal intelligence that is genuinely rare. His prose is lucid, rhythmically controlled, and capable of extraordinary tenderness. Say That You’ll See Me Again is his most ambitious and fully realised novel to date – a work that asks hard questions about what it means to recover, and who we become in the attempt.
From the Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Say That You’ll See Me Again follows what becomes of them. Told through a polyphony of voices – Lucy’s journal letters addressed to the absent Liv, Mike’s restless and darkly funny interior monologue, and a series of lyrical passages that open out the novel’s emotional world across generations – it is a book about the aftermath of crisis: the grinding difficulty of provincial life, the longing for connection, and the way certain friendships mark us permanently, whether or not they survive.
Barney Norris writes about young people in extremis with a moral seriousness and formal intelligence that is genuinely rare. His prose is lucid, rhythmically controlled, and capable of extraordinary tenderness. Say That You’ll See Me Again is his most ambitious and fully realised novel to date – a work that asks hard questions about what it means to recover, and who we become in the attempt.
From the Somerset Maugham Award-winning author of Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain.
Genre: Literary Fiction