Finding Helen

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In his late 40s, in a career and a marriage that have each lost their lustre, Chris Gale is someone to whom life never quite kept its promise. One morning, as he is leaving for work, he hears a song on the radio: a song that transports him back to an altogether better, happier time – the early 1970s, when youth, idealism and music, especially the music of singer-songwriter Helen Leonard, might have chnaged the world. Haunted by a raw sense of loss and a growing resentment at how life has turned out, Chris - goaded on by the mysterious, elusive apparition of the 'Beagle Man' - begins a physical, spiritual and emotional quest. Revisiting old haunts and old memories, he searches for an answer to a question that has haunted him, unanswered, for nearly 30 years: what did Fate hold in store for the woman he devoted himself to so entirely all those years ago – the maddening, mercurial, mischievous Helen Leonard… Witty, elegiac, affecting and, as the narrative unrolls, increasingly disturbing, FINDING HELEN is a novel about the consequences of loss – of innocence, idealism and youth, a novel about memory and obsession, betrayal and forgiveness and what might lie beyond the veil…

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Born in 1954 and educated at Oxford, Colin Greenland is the author of a number of acclaimed science fiction and fantasy novels, including the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Take Back Plenty. He also reviews new fiction for the Guardian. Finding Helen is his first contemporary novel. He lives in Cambridge with the author Susanna Clarke.