The spider truces

Against the vividly described background of 1980s rural Kent, this moving portrait of a father-son relationship shifts effortlessly between evoking the terrors and joys of adolescence and the complicated pleasure and pain of being an adult. Ellis is obsessed by the spiders that inhabit the crumbling house where he lives with his dad, his older sister, and Great-aunt Mafi—and also by a need to find out more about his mother, whose death overshadows the family’s otherwise happy existence. From early attempts at relationships, to unskilled jobs, flat shares, and drug-addled nights on the beach, Ellis muddles his way towards adulthood. Meanwhile Denny, an ex-Merchant Navy man, bottles up his grief at the loss of his wife, refusing to talk about her.