Description

Set in Yorkshire in the 1980s, The Way the Day Breaks is a novel about family, love, memory and mental illness.

We follow one family, mostly in car trips across the dales, as they discuss nature, speculate on the future, dream up get-rich schemes, laugh, quarrel and try to hold together.

But there is a darker current running beneath this family’s shared life. The father, Sinclair, is approaching a manic episode, and life in the family becomes strained. The impact of his breakdown is heartbreaking and felt through the children down the years, especially by the youngest son, Michael.

As formally inventive as it is narratively rich, the story unfolds in two modes, through dialogue and through the poetic reflections of Michael, some years later.

The Way the Day Breaks is one of the most moving, honest accounts of the way mental illness vibrates through the life of a family.

Publisher Review

"Moving, evocative, and brilliantly well-judged, this novel is a triumph." Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13; "It's the best new novel I've read in years - it comes as close to catching the truth of life as perhaps anything I've ever read. It very much deserves awards in the year to come." Sara Baume, Seven Steeples; "The Way the Day Breaks is a quietly devastating novel where the page disappears and you are just there, with the characters. A deeply human story.; Tim Clare, The Ice House"A brilliant novel that I will be recommending for years to come. Read it." Toby Litt, A Writer's Diary. ; "In prose as recklessly inventive as its protagonist, David Roberts captures the claustrophobia of living with someone whose mind is working overtime, and the impact of that over the years. A wonderful debut." ; Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13 "A sonorous black box of a novel, recovered from the wreck of a family breakdown. In this inventive and poetic debut, childhood nostalgia is served with a garnish of broken glass and torrential English weather" Ben Pester, Am I in the Right Place?