Along the margin-sand

It is 1964, the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King, the Boston strangler, the Beatles and Cassius Clay. In a world caught up with daily news of war trials in West Germany, race riots in the USA, and a bank robbery in England, Peter Jackson, a 12-year-old boy, moves to France with his mother to start a new life after the sudden death of his father. His mother is determined to look to a new future and forget her past life in England, but the locals have other ideas. When a Jewish Nazi hunter arrives at the converted convent that Mrs Jackson bought, her two long-term tenants have different reasons to be concerned and the mystery of the wartime traitor codenamed Saturn resurfaces twenty years on. The past that she longed to leave behind, threatens to become Peter's future. Along the margin-sand is this summer's must-read book - a story that captures the essence of forgiveness, a virtue rooted in the future. And yet this is a story set squarely in the shadow of revenge which, by its very nature, is grounded in the past.