Thin, Brittle, Mile

By Katharine Collins Katharine Collins

Subjects: Mile, Brittle, Thin

Description: “FOR THOSE WHO LIVED, THOSE WE LOST AND THOSE THEY LEFT BEHIND” Katharine Collins’ Thin, Brittle, Mile is the energetic story of three brothers. Luke and Tyler Dearlove travel to remote Skidaway Island, a place of extremes as beautiful as it is bleak, searching for their missing sibling Howie. The two brothers soon sense that something is terribly wrong on the island as their inquiries stir up the most insidious of hornets’ nests. From the island’s unforgiving, crumbling and fierce landscapes, to its rugged coastline, the entire sins of the world seem to hang heavy and are ever present. The melting pot of inhabitants of the last remaining islanders defying the mainland company trying to expatriate them, and the illegally imported Eastern European and North African labourers brought in to carry out the company’s dark work, co-habit in a rising tension bordering on the fringes of all-out war. As the brothers pick their way through the island’s shrouded mystery on the search for their missing sibling, Luke, the younger of the two, a former soldier recently returned from a tour of duty, physically unscathed but left with a broken spirit, carries the plight of the lonely believer in a world beyond belief, battling on with dogged tenacity and quiet rage. Only mildly aware of his own limitations and failings, Tyler begrudgingly follows Luke’s quest to find their brother, or if not to find him, then at least to find the truth about his probable murder. Tyler has no choice but to accept that his soul-sick, traumatised younger brother simply wants to find the truth, even if only to lay down beside their lost sibling and join him in restful death. Piece by piece the present begins to reveal the past and, as the brothers get dangerously close to the truth. Their venture into the land without pity ends in a cold and brutal dark night of the soul, leaving Tyler finally able to understand that the open and festering wounds of war are nothing compared to the scars that war leaves on the human heart. This is a glorious masterpiece of multi-faceted writing, probing every one of our senses, taking us to our imagined limits of Human endurance and beyond with astonishingly pictorial writing, continuously fluctuating passage of time, place and reality of darkness and light. It triggers our own buried and darkest fears that forever persist in the hearts of returning traumatised soldiers and bring us to the realisation that thank God it wasn’t us. The reader is subjected to every Human emotion and the raw, stark and unapologetic vision of the absolute truth of the aftermath of battle. We are simultaneously shocked, disgusted and quietly elated; gently caressed and betrayed. Compulsive page turning transports us from our own insecure complacency to the stark reality of real violent horror and fear, to the inevitable false insulation of our own inept emotional security, in the most basic form of animalistic human behaviour which only springs from war. We are unrelentingly and unapologetically dragged by the scruff of our necks and have our noses rubbed into the reality of sudden and violent death, torture and trauma interspersed with surprising and unexpected fleeting fragments of beauty, triumph and joy. This is a MUST READ and you must read it at least twice! “EVERY MAN’S FINAL JOURNEY IS ALWAYS THE JOURNEY HOME”