Foulness : a novel

It is 1957 and a Russian jet flies over Foulness Island.

The photograph it takes starts a chain reaction, alarming military intelligence and unsettling the Essex farming community that endures within its barbed-wire enclosure. James arrives with orders to camouflage this secret installation.

But despite orderly Miss Bradshaw's efforts, an abandoned Victorian printing press soon diverts his attention away from tripwire fears to Foulness' colonial past. The cannons of the British Empire and the British Atom bomb were refined beside this perilous tidal path known as The Broomway.

Rockets tested over Thames sandbanks turned on an Abyssinian mountain fortress.

The A-bomb transported to Australia's already devastated Aboriginal lands.

Foulness traces trajectiories from Victorian Imperialism to the Cold War.