The Last Photograph

Emma Chapman

27 July 2017
9781509816569
336 pages

Synopsis

He walks into the living room and June is dead.
He centres her, checking the light. Focusing, he clicks the shutter.
He'll ask himself later, if he knew. It's easy to say that he had acted without thinking, out of instinct.

Rook Henderson is an award-winning photographer, still carrying the hidden scars of war. Now, suddenly, he is also a widower. Leaving his son Ralph to pick up the pieces, Rook flies to Vietnam for the first time in fifty years, escaping to the landscape of a place he once knew so well.

But when Ralph follows him out there, seeking answers from the father he barely knows, Rook is forced to unwind his past: his childhood in Yorkshire, his life in London in the 1960s and his marriage to the unforgettable June - and to ask himself what price he has paid for a life behind the lens . . .

Gripping, evocative and unforgettable, The Last Photograph is a story of a life shaped by trauma and love - and the secrets that make us who we are.

Evocative, harrowing. . .Emma Chapman tackles the big subjects of love and war with aplomb