The Wainwright Boys - Paul Webb

One anonymous woman… with a dream. Four unrelated men… all in receipt of an identical solicitor’s letter urging them to travel to the town of Keswick in the heart of England’s Lake District. A washed-up alcoholic City banker, a time-share crook living on the Spanish Costas, the neurotic gay owner of a B&B and a destitute hippy living on his wreck of a boat are all inexplicably summoned. There is the promise of ‘something to their advantage’ but even without this enticement all have good reason to want to escape their current everyday situations. The four men’s converging journeys, by air, road, sea, and mountain paths produce four very different stories. Each has its own cast of eccentrics and grotesques, and a few saints and saviours, laughable disasters and chaotic episodes of high farce. There are also unexpected moments of sensitivity and pathos and as the characters reach their journeys’ ends it’s clear none of their lives will ever be quite the same. And one mountain…bleak and brutal, it holds the key to the mystery and provides the rainswept setting for the dramatic and tragic climax.