Your Fault

Metro: Best Fiction of 2019

Longlisted for the Not the Booker Prize 2019

‘Elegant, unsparing, meticulously detailed novel in which a conscientious boy grows up with bedeviled parents. Where do men come from? They come from boys. Look again.’ —Margaret Atwood

‘A small masterpiece’ —Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

‘A terse, bitterly poignant novel about guilt and the art of retrospection’ —Claire Allfree, Daily Mail

‘If clarity of recollection is an art, Andrew Cowan is a master.’ —Jane Graham, Big Issue

Set in a 1960s English new town, Your Fault charts one boy’s childhood from first memory to first love. A year older in each chapter, Peter’s story is told to him by his future self as he attempts to recreate the optimism and futurism of the 1960s, and to reveal how that utopianism fares as it emerges into the Seventies. It’s an untold story of British working class experience, written with extraordinary precision and tenderness.