Trouble Was by Charlotte Edwardes review – a sharp child’s-eye view of adult neglect

A young boy and his two siblings stay with their aunt in the West Country, in this haunting debut set over the long, hot summer of 1976 The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under the kind of pressure that fuels fiction. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s first novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by that heatwave with its attendant, escalating water shortage...

By Sarah Moss