In advance of her new novel The Road to Urbino read Roma Tearne s brilliant Brixton Beach. Opening with the horrors of the London bombings this is the profoundly moving story of civil war & a child s struggle to come to terms with loss. London. On a bright July morning a series of bombs brings the capital to a halt. Simon Swann a medic from one of the large teaching hospitals is searching frantically amongst the chaos & the rubble. All around police sirens & ambulances are screaming but Simon does not hear. He is out of breath because he has been running & he is distraught. But who is he looking for? To find out we have first to go back thirty years to a small island in the Indian Ocean where a little girl named Alice Fonseka is learning to ride a bicycle on the beach. The island is Sri Lanka & its community is on the brink of civil war. Alice s life is about to change forever. Soon she will have to leave for England abandoning her beloved grandfather & accompanied by her mother Sita a woman broken by a series of terrible events. In London Alice grows into womanhood. Trapped in a loveless marriage she has a son. Slowly she fulfils her grandfathers prophecy & becomes an artist. Eventually she finds true love. But London in the twenty-first century is a mass of migration & suspicion. The war on terror has begun & everyone even Simon Swann middle class rational medic that he is will be caught up in this war in the most unexpected & terrible way.