Devon, 1937

Lucie, just seven years old, newly arrived in England, watches blood drip from her mother’s hem as she crosses the footbridge to the train that will snatch her out of her life, the words, ‘Don’t leave me,’ captured in her throat.

Clifford glances at the small girl sitting beside him as they drive back to The Ruins, the ancestral home Lucie has never known. Once alive with weekend parties, croquet and swimming in the lake, ‘These days, nobody is happy here,’ Clifford tells Lucie.

Enid, in the vast, dark kitchen, clutches a cigarette and a sour drink, her violet eyes appraising the new arrival like a spider intent on a fly. She murmurs, ‘She’s got Kyte in her. Looks like Ruth.’ But this is not a compliment.

Ruth, seethes with rage as she studies her own lovely face in the mirror of her cabin, aboard the ocean liner that will carry her and the husband who has betrayed her away from her daughter and back to Malaya. ‘Plenty of mothers do this,’ she tells herself.

As Lucie pieces together the story of her family and the mother who vanishes from her childhood, she will make unlikely friendships and discover the joy of imagination; and in the years that follow, will tread a precarious line taking her to unexpected places, both in herself and the rapidly changing world around her.

The Ruins is a glorious, sweeping debut about coming of age, forging identity and the search for home, spanning three decades and crossing continents, from a powerful new voice, Becky Docton.