Your Fault

Synopsis

Metro: Best Fiction of 2019

Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019

‘Elegant, unsparing, meticulously detailed novel in which a conscientious boy grows up with bedeviled parents. Where do men come from? They come from boys. Look again.’ —Margaret Atwood

‘A small masterpiece’ —Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

‘A terse, bitterly poignant novel about guilt and the art of retrospection’ —Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

‘If clarity of recollection is an art, Andrew Cowan is a master.’ —Jane Graham, Big Issue

Set in a 1960s English new town, Your Fault charts one boy’s childhood from first memory to first love. A year older in each chapter, Peter’s story is told to him by his future self as he attempts to recreate the optimism and futurism of the 1960s, and to reveal how that utopianism fares as it emerges into the Seventies. It’s an untold story of British working class experience, written with extraordinary precision and tenderness.

Praise for this Book

‘Beautifully crafted, unsettling and vivid, this book perfectly highlights the subtleties and mysteries of everyday life, creating a world which seems ordinary even while something ominous bubbles just beneath the surface. The narrative balances between a kind of universality and an arresting specificity, exploring the relationship between memory and guilt, as it builds towards its electrifying ending.’ —Emma Healey

‘Cowan’s writing is observant and unsentimental, wryly funny and tragic, and his portrait of post-war Britain finds humour and heart in the most unlikely details.’ —D. W. Wilson

‘Andrew Cowan’s latest novel is a brilliant guided tour of a childhood, full of his typically sharp insights into family tenderness and regret. Technically daring, emotionally rewarding, I haven’t read anything quite like it.’ —Richard Beard

‘This is an exceptional work of fiction.’ —Naomi Wood

Reviews of this Book

‘Written in the second person singular, and with a chapter devoted to each year of Peter’s life from two to 13, this is a terse, bitterly poignant novel about guilt and the art of retrospection.’ —Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

‘Elegant, unsparing, meticulously detailed novel in which a conscientious boy grows up with bedevilled parents. Where do men come from? They come from boys. Look again.’ —Margaret Atwood

‘Four things attracted me to Andrew Cowan’s Your Fault: its working class, ‘60s setting; its unusual structure; its length and its publisher, Salt Publishing whose list is never anything but interesting.’ —Susan Osborne, A Life In Books

‘Cowan embraces every detail of the “buttery shades” of the Sixties with his trademark meticulousness, from the layout of the brand-new estate Peter lives on – “short terraces of four and six houses are oriented at a thirty-degree angle to the road” – to the rented television, the Tri-ang bricks, the ICI polyester slacks, the budgerigar (one in four British homes had one in 1966).’ —Markie Robson-Scott, The Tablet

‘Your Fault is a fascinating novel in which a man looks back on his childhood with the self-awareness denied him at the time, and in which the act of remembering matters as much as the events themselves.’ —Alastair Mabbott, The Herald

‘Corby writer Andrew Cowan made a big splash with his 2002 debut, coming-of-age tale Pig. His new novel, Your Fault, is just as good as that touching, insightful book. If clarity of recollection is an art, Andrew Cowan is a master.’ —Jane Graham, Big Issue

‘Slowly, traumatic details emerge, as the novel builds towards the final tragedy that lies just offstage in the future. The quality of recall and, above all, the play with time, make this tightly focused book a small masterpiece.’ —Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

‘Your Fault, Andrew Cowan’s sixth novel, is relentless in its attempt at recollection of a vanished time, and perhaps for this reason accesses a painful past that comes with a very bitter notion of home.’ —Jonathan McAloon, Irish Times