After Brock is a slightly eccentric rite-of-passage novel rooted firmly in the Marches. In September 2009, we are told, an 18-year-old boy called Nat Kempsey disappeared for five days into the Berwyn mountains, on the Welsh side of the border. Paul Binding is at all times specific about time, place and names; the story has an air of veracity which carries the reader with it even when the dialogue seems forced and the coincidences improbable.
Nat, recovering from his mountain ordeal in the bedroom above his father’s kite shop in Leominster, tells his story to a more-than-averagely alert reporter from the local newspaper. It soon becomes evident that the story that really needs telling belongs to Nat’s father, Pete.
Pete grew up in Leominster in the 1970s, a grammar school boy, admiring Genesis and the Grateful Dead, at odds with his chilly, respectable parents, jealous of his admired younger brothers.
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