The Spider Truces by Tom Connolly
Ellis is driven to learn more about his mother, whose passing casts a pall over the family’s generally content life, as well as the spiders that lurk in the dilapidated house where he lives with his father, elder sister, and great-aunt Mafi. He has an awful habit of saying his ideas aloud regardless of the company, making him feel uncomfortable and out of place most of the time. He is also hilarious.
The Spider Truces by Tom Connolly
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Ellis stumbles his way to adulthood through early relationships, unskilled work, flatshares, and drug-fueled beach evenings. Denny, his father, and his passionate relationship with his adventurous sister, who always shows up when he needs her with a new boyfriend in tow, are what persist. The family jokes are Ellis’ lifeline and a solace from the agony of his unrelenting need to learn something—anything—about his mother. Denny, a former merchant navy veteran, suppresses his sadness over the death of his wife and avoids talking about her.
This compelling depiction of a father-son relationship seamlessly transitions between conjuring the terrors and joys of youth and the complex pleasure and anguish of being an adult against the beautifully portrayed backdrop of rural Kent in the 1980s.
A fascinating and wonderful tale of love, trust, grief, life, and moving on that developed subtly between periods of exquisite detail, demonstrating Tom Connolly’s obvious passion for writing as much as his desire to tell the tale. It’s an excellent book to read. Emotional highs and lows are accompanied by likeable characters that you want to comprehend in the same manner that they want to comprehend one another. The descriptions of specific locations are incredibly beautiful. The main character, Ellis, claims he reads novels until he can “taste” them, and that is exactly how the descriptive prose works here; it is written with such clarity that you can practically taste the sea as you read it.
