Crime and Punishment

A young woman wakes up in her bedroom in hospital. She has emerged from a prolonged coma. Rather than going back to her husband and child, she leaves the home and begins walking into the wilderness. Walking to the Moon details her journey from darkness to light, from the profound psychological trauma that caused her to withdraw from the world, and the mountains of the mind she must conquer in order to rejoin it. Walking to the Moon is not a bleak or dark journey. It is beautifully written, observant, witty and often profoundly moving. Kate Cole-Adams has mastered the art of empathy so that the reader is instantly recruited to side with our heroine and to cheer her on, step by step, in her search to reconnect with the world.

In 1951 the Festival of Britain marks a new golden age of hope and prosperity for the country. Things are certainly looking up for the criminal elite who run the East End.

For Jack, a draft-dodger with aspirations to be a champion boxer, there's easy money to be made for providing a bit of muscle. Meanwhile his sister Kath must keep secret the fact that she killed their father to protect her son, Brian, from the abuse she experienced as a child. Brian is so traumatised by witnessing this event that the complex union of violence and sexuality will shape his character for life.

As the years go by and disillusion sets in, successive Labour and Tory governments aren't able to stop the rot. Younger, nastier criminals like the Kray twins and the Richardson brothers begin to carve out their own criminal empires and crush all resistance. Brutalised and embittered by years of failure and imprisonment, Jack decides to make a stand. The stage is set for one big war.

Crime and Punishment is the first volume in a two-part epic, and follows the characters' lives up until the accession of Thatcher. The second volume will trace the dramatic changes in criminal society that reflected the wider social upheaval of the times, right up until the present day.

Autorentext

G.F. Newman