[Annotatie]: In 1771, Mr Earnshaw returns to Yorkshire from Liverpool with a bundle in his arms.'As dark almost as if it came from the devil', the adoption of this strange apparition becomes the starting point of Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights. Almost two-hundred years later, Monica Johnson - a young woman growing up in a conservative family in the north of England - leaves her place at Oxford to marry a man from the Caribbean against her parents' wishes and struggles to bring up their children as a single mother in Leeds. While Ben is popular and does well at school, Tommy is bullied and remains an outcast, as stigmatised by the origins of his parentage as Heathcliff was. Vulnerable and alone, when Tommy disappears, the precarious family bond is demolished with an intensity matched only by Heathcliff's arrival into the Earnshaw clan. In the tradition of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and J M Coetzee's Foe, Phillips boldly re-imagines the origins of Heathcliff and the manner in which he emerged from Emily Bronte's imagination in a haunting new novel about migration, social exclusion and the difficulties of family.
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