by Karen Perry
He sees a bed and a sofa, curtains fluttering in the open air.
As he reaches the street he lives on, the dust in the air thickens. A great cloud of it rises to meet him.
He stands still.
About his feet, there is a shuffle and flutter. He looks down and sees hundreds of books strewn about the road.
In the clearing, the sky is flat and dark. The buildings that have remained standing look yellow and barren.
He scans the wreckage. An image from earlier in the evening returns: he is standing in the narrow passageway, holding his sleeping son in his arms – he can almost feel again the softness of his flesh, the warmth of his body.
And yet another astonishing reality confronts him. The building where once he worked, slept, loved, fathered, painted, put his son to sleep, where he lived and called his home, is simply and irrevocably no more; it is sunken into the earth, swallowed, gone.
Critical Acclaim for
THE BOY THAT NEVER WAS
‘Genuinely Surprising’ GUARDIAN
‘A beautifully written, tense and twisty tale’ SUNDAY MIRROR
‘Taut, smartly written, empathetic and at times unbearably tense … The Boy That Never Was hits the bullseye’ THE IRISH INDEPENDENT
‘Cleverly written. A tense domestic thriller that is full of surprises. Dig a little deeper and you will find the broken heartbeat of this book which is the irreparable grief of the loss of a child’ MAIL ON SUNDAY
‘This is a debut novel that will catch fire’ NELSON DEMILLE
‘A truly remarkable novel. The Boy That Never Was is a pitch-perfect balance of driving plot and honest, complex human emotion. Written in a captivating, lyrical style and brilliantly structured, the story grips your heart from the first pages and simply never lets go’ JEFFERY DEAVER
‘The Boy That Never Was is that powerful thing, a beautifully written mystery driven by its exploration of the characters’ innermost hearts – of the inexorable ripples that loss sends out, and the terrible damage people can do to those they love most. Both as a crime novel and as an emotional journey, It’s gripping stuff’ TANA FRENCH
‘A twist-filled page-turner’ CLOSER
‘I shot through this in one sitting. Like Gone Girl, it’s told alternately by a husband and his wife. At the very beginning, something very shocking happens … It’s the most gripping thing I’ve read for ages’ EVENING STANDARD
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2015
Text copyright © Karen Gillece and Paul Perry, 2015
Cover images: © Alamy; © Plainpicture; © Shutterstock
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-91313-3
