Finding Helen - Colin Greenland

In his late 40s, in a career and a marriage that have each lost their lustre, Chris Gale is someone to whom life never quite kept its promise.

One morning, as he is leaving for work, he hears a song on the radio: a song that transports him back to an altogether better, happier time - the early 1970s, when youth, idealism and music, especially the music of singer-songwriter Helen Leonard, might have chnaged the world. Haunted by a raw sense of loss and a growing resentment at how life has turned out, Chris - goaded on by the mysterious, elusive apparition of the 'Beagle Man' - begins a physical, spiritual and emotional quest. Revisiting old haunts and old memories, he searches for an answer to a question that has haunted him, unanswered, for nearly 30 years: what did Fate hold in store for the woman he devoted himself to so entirely all those years ago - the maddening, mercurial, mischievous Helen Leonard...

Witty, elegiac, affecting and, as the narrative unrolls, increasingly disturbing, FINDING HELEN is a novel about the consequences of loss - of innocence, idealism and youth, a novel about memory and obsession, betrayal and forgiveness and what might lie beyond the veil...

Born in 1954 and educated at Oxford, Colin Greenland is the author of a number of acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels, including the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Take Back Plenty. He also reviews new fiction for the Guardian. Finding Helen is his first contemporary novel. He lives in Cambridge with the author Susanna Clarke.

'A beautifully written tale of betrayal and forgiveness'
Heat

'This engaging narrative kept me intrigued to the end...As one would expect from Colin Greenland, the novel is a cunning piece of artifice'
CHARLES PALLISER, author of The Quincunx

'Mature, readable, effortlessly impressive'
M. JOHN HARRISON, author of Light

'Wonderfully elegiac...what gives it emotional power is Greenland's evocation of time and place and the sense of lost possibilities'
ROBERT IRWIN, author of The Arabian Nightmare

'Colin Greenland has the kind of mind most writers would kill for. His prose is as flexible and dangerous as a rapier, while his stories go for both the head and the heart'
Neil Gaiman