The Sea Change Paperback / softback

A Richard and Judy Summer 2013 Book Club pick. The Sea Change by Joanna Rossiter is a haunting and moving novel about a mother and a daughter, caught between a tsunami and a war. Yesterday was Alice's wedding day. She is thousands of miles away from the home she is so desperate to leave, on the southernmost tip of India, when she wakes in the morning to see a wave on the horizon, taller than the height of her guest house on Kanyakumari beach.

Her husband is nowhere to be seen. On the other side of the world, unhappily estranged from her daughter, is Alice's mother, Violet.

Forced to leave the idyllic Wiltshire village, Imber, in which she grew up after it was requisitioned by the army during the Second World War, Violet is haunted by the shadow of the man she loved and the wilderness of a home that lies in ruins. As Alice searches for her husband in the debris of the wave she is forced to face up to some truths about herself she has been hiding from.

Meanwhile Violet is compelled to return to Imber to discover just why she abandoned her great love . . . 'A great theme: impermanence, and the sweeping away of everything we believed was certain.

Joanna Rossiter really shines with lovely, fluid, restrained writing.

This is such a moving story ' Helen Dunmore Joanna Rossiter grew up in Dorset and studied English at Cambridge University before working as a researcher in the House of Commons and as a copy writer.

In 2011 she completed an MA in Writing at Warwick University.

The Sea Change is her first novel. She lives and writes in London.