Film star Amelie Hart is the darling of the silver screen, appearing on the front pages of every newspaper. But at the peak of her fame she throws it all away for a regular guy with an ordinary job. The gossip columns are aghast: what happened to the woman who turned heads wherever she went?
Any hopes the furore will die down are crushed when Amelie's boyfriend Dave is arrested on charges of child sexual abuse. Dave strongly asserts his innocence, and when Amelie refuses to denounce him, the press witch hunt quickly turns into physical violence, and she has to flee the country.
While Dave is locked up with the most depraved men in the country and Amelie is hiding on the continent, Damaris, the victim at the centre of the story, is isolated - a child trying to make sense of an adult world.
Breathtakingly brutal, dark and immensely moving, A Song of Isolation looks beneath the magpie glimmer of celebrity to uncover a sinister world dominated by greed and lies, and the unfathomable destruction of innocent lives ... in an instant.
***
She sat in the back of the parked taxi, hand tight on the handle of the door, and looked around, scanning the street for strangers. PROLOGUE, LONDON 2010
***
(@OrendaBooks, 17 July 2020, 304 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed, #BlogTour 8 September via @OrendaBooks)
***
***
This book affected me more than anything I've read for a while. I was angry, I was sad, I was frustrated and everything else in between. There was a point, after Dave's verdict is read that I got so upset I considered stopping reading the book completely. Then I realised that having such an emotional response to a book was a good thing. So I kept reading and kept getting upset but couldn't stop turning the pages. I thought I knew what this book was going to be but I was the exact opposite. It completely blew me away. One of the best books I've read in ages.