Finding Helen

Tracy is a very troubled child living in a therapeutic care home in the 1980s. 'Finding Helen' uses an engaging mix of her caseworker's notes, heartfelt poetry which she writes to express her innermost thoughts and feelings, and a narrative of her volatile true-life story. As her case-worker Helen and the other staff attempt to understand the reasons behind Tracy's abusive and self-destructive behaviour, Tracy is torn between her desire to kill those around her and her desperate need to be loved. But as her negative behaviour escalates and the threat of psychiatric care becomes increasingly likely, can one woman's love be enough to save her?

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...