Three Seasons

In a South Coast port, a middle-aged trawlerman has one last throw of the dice. In the Thames Valley, property is booming. And the meek won’t inherit the earth. In a Warwickshire vicarage the Master of an Oxford college must try to unite past and present. Three Seasons is about the Thatcher era in Britain, but it is not about politics. These three stories are portraits of a country and its people on the verge of change.

Three Seasons is a book of three novellas, unconnected with each other, but all set in the south of England in the 1980s. In Spring, a middle-aged Hull trawler skipper, his great days gone, has one last throw of the dice a South Coast port. In Summer, an ambitious young man makes his way in the booming Thames Valley property market, unconcerned with the damage he does to others. In Autumn, the Master of an Oxford college welcomes his two sons home, but they awake difficult memories from half a century before. Three Seasons is about the Thatcher era in Britain, but it is not about politics. These three stories are portraits of a country and its people on the verge of change.

Mike Robbins is a journalist turned development worker. He is also the author of Even the Dead are Coming (2009), a memoir of Sudan; Crops and Carbon (2011), on agriculture and climate change; a novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (2014); and The Nine Horizons (2014), a pen-portrait of some of the countries in which he has worked and travelled since 1987. He is currently in New York.