Just about everyone knows a family like the Radleys. Many of us grew up
next door to one. They are a modern family, averagely content, averagely dysfunctional, living in a staid and quiet suburban English town. Peter is an overworked doctor whose wife, Helen, has become increasingly
remote and uncommunicative. Rowan, their teenage son, is being bullied
at school, and their anemic daughter, Clara, has recently become a
vegan. They are typical, that is, save for one devastating exception:
Peter and Helen are vampires and have — for seventeen years — been
abstaining by choice from a life of chasing blood in the hope that their children could live normal lives.
One night, Clara finds herself
driven to commit a shocking — and disturbingly satisfying — act of violence, and her parents are forced to explain their history of shadows and
lies. A police investigation is launched that uncovers a richness of
vampire history heretofore unknown to the general public. And when the
malevolent and alluring Uncle Will, a practicing vampire, arrives to
throw the police off Clara’s trail, he winds up throwing the whole house into temptation and turmoil and unleashing a host of dark secrets that
threaten the Radleys’ marriage.
The Radleys is a moving,
thrilling, and radiant domestic novel that explores with daring the
lengths a parent will go to protect a child, what it costs you to deny
your identity, the undeniable appeal of sin, and the everlasting,
iridescent bonds of family love. Read it and ask what we grow into when
we grow up, and what we gain — and lose — when we deny our appetites.
