Sat 04 Apr 2007A broken view from the shoreFiction:If Booker short-listed author Trezza
Azzopardi has a recognisable territory it is those lives conducted
on the margins. The Hiding Place, her debut novel, which made it on
to the Booker shortlist as a rank outsider in 2000, drew on her own
background growing up in an immigrant community - she is
half-Maltese - in 1950s Wales. Remember Me, her second novel,
followed elderly bag lady Winnie as she sets out to win back her
few pathetic belongings, a journey that becomes a painstaking
reconstruction of a lost self.In Winterton Blue, there are two lost characters, Lewis and
Anna, one deeply disturbed by the events of the past, the other
suffering from partial deafness, which puts them both at a
necessary distance from the world. Lewis is a drifter, haunted by a
joyriding episode of his youth in which his twin brother, Wayne,
was drowned when the car plunged into the water. He is set upon
assigning blame for Wayne's death and wreaking murderous revenge on
the person he believes is responsible; what he discovers at the end
of his therapeutic quest is a truth altogether different from the
one he has pieced together from the jigsaw of memories that
constantly assail and threaten to undo him.