Shutterspeed

It is the height of summer. In a small, stifling village a young boy's childhood shudders to a close. Joris's father is dead for reasons he is only beginning to understand. His mother is in Spain, for reasons he doesn't want to think about. He lives with his aunt and uncle, in a village where intense dramas run their course in the background, half-seen and little understood. In faded images from half-remembered photographs, through memories invented or suppressed, the last summer of eleven-year-old Joris's childhood comes to an end, deftly picked out in Erwin Mortier's elegant and affecting prose.