Tom McCulloch – författare

Jim Drever is a man apart, his closest relationship with the machinery he monitors in the distillery where he's worked for twenty years. He treats everything else with bleakly humorous contempt: his fading marriage, the increasingly bizarre behaviour of his teenage son; his daughter's impending wedding. He can deal with all that in his own way. It's the emails from Cuba, made up of letters from his dead mother, that threaten to bring down Jim's ordered world.

Jonas Mortensen wants to be liked. Adam Fletcher wants to be forgotten. Jonas, a freewheeling Norwegian, has been living in a quiet English village for years, an eccentric everyone has an opinion about. Then the real owner of his house turns up. Fletcher, a traumatised veteran of the Afghan War, has come to claim his inheritance. The two men live side by side in an increasingly bizarre standoff, until a teenage girl goes missing and suspicion falls on Jonas. As the hunt intensifies, it's clear both men are concealing past lives that won't stay hidden much longer.