The White Rock

'Absolutely a story for our times, and a fiercely important one, too' Clover Stroud, author of The Red of my Blood

I see you. Inside the cage you have been given. The cage you have made. The cages we have all made

The White Rock stands, ancient and sacred, off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Four people, across four centuries, each navigating ruptures to the world they know, are irresistibly drawn to it.

A British writer travels in 2020 with her husband and young daughter to give thanks for the birth of their child. She looks to the White Rock for answers, even as her faith in her marriage, and the future itself, is unravelling.

An American rock star in 1969 is in the final act of his self-destruction. On the run from the law, from his rabid fans and an America burning with the fever of the Vietnam War, he washes up at the edge of Mexico, hoping to lose, or maybe find himself.

A Yoeme girl is torn from her homeland at the turn of the twentieth century and taken by force to the coast. As her future is recast in the name of progress and power, she turns to the stories of her people, to resist, and to survive.

And in 1775 a young Spanish naval officer, preparing to set sail from the White Rock to continue the conquest of the Pacific coast, appears to lose his grip on reality, with far-reaching and fatal consequences . . .

Each finding themselves at the end of the story they have lived by, their tales echo, breathtakingly, through time. As the White Rock bears witness to the truth that we are not the first to face days of reckoning, is there still a chance we might not be the last?

'I loved it. I became invested in each of the different eras and was struck by the sense of unknowable forces outliving us all. It is full of wisdom, intricate and emotional, and it will linger in my head for a long time.' Dave Haslam, author of Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor