Going Home

Téo Erskine is in his thirties, with a good job and a slick London apartment, and he likes to make sure his old suburban friends notice that he can afford to pay for the drinks. When he comes home for the odd weekend, he keeps steering the conversation toward Lia, the one woman in their circle, wanting to know whether she is seeing anyone and whether she might give him a second chance. He suspects something once happened between Lia and Ben Mossam, his closest friend and his biggest irritation, but he can't bring himself to ask. Lia has no patience for their rivalry. She is raising her toddler son, Joel, on her own, and Téo now and then makes a halfhearted offer to babysit.

Then, during one of those weekends, a tragedy strikes at the center of the group, and Téo ends up as the improbable guardian of little Joel. He isn't alone in it. His father, Vic, Ben, and Sybil, Lia's charming rabbi, all pitch in while they wait to find Joel a permanent home. None of them is remotely suited to the job. Between them they teach him video games, feed him chicken nuggets and waffles, and slowly learn how to sing him to sleep.

Just as the arrangement settles into something that works, a juvenile mistake leads to a painful betrayal, and Téo has to decide what kind of man he wants to be.

Tom Lamont's first novel is warm, funny and observant. It looks at how a child can push the adults around him to grow up fast while also keeping them young at heart.