Boarding House Reach

In Peter Crawley's Boarding House Reach five guests retreat on the Norfolk shore. Though strangers, their lives are bound by a common thread; some of which may help them escape and others which will harm.

Boarding House Reach is a captivating novel about five individual characters who meet one weekend in a guest house. Located on the Norfolk coast, The Reach offers sanctuary for guests Hacker, Phoebe, Audrey, Philip and the landlady, Stella – all of whom are trying to escape their past.

"Hacker turned off the radio and checked his mobile. He was nervous the way he used to be in the run up to a big game. Only this weekend it wasn't soccer he was off to play."

Hacker, like the other guests, has a chequered past but hopes The Reach will be an escape from reality. In a story which encompasses blackmail, rejection, infidelity and love the characters of Boarding House Reach must accept they will never escape the brutal reality of their tangled lives no matter how far they run. The scandal of The Reach will remain in their lives forever but will they survive to tell the tale..?

"Some years ago I was marooned in a Bed & Breakfast on the Norfolk coast for a weekend. I whiled away the hours of rain by talking to the other residents about what had brought them to such an out of the way haven. Each one had their own, very personal story to tell, and each story was fashioned by the individual's unique history and their social circumstance. Whilst none of their stories are told in Boarding House Reach, I was intrigued by the circuitous routes by which each of them had come to the guest house and by how it is that we, as products of our nature and nurture, are steered towards different destinations as much by the wind as by our own hand," says Peter Crawley on the inspiration behind the secrecy and scandal of Boarding House Reach.