Nigel Peace

Broken Sea Nigel Peace

Broken Sea is a novel, a story of love and of personal identity, which begins in the summer of 1968. Two young people meet by chance and fall in love, but their struggles to understand the depth of their feelings are confounded by international politics. The story explores the emergence of young people's inner worlds in the face of tragedy and personal challenge in the outer world.

Roy has just left school at 18 but is still a boy: he has a good heart but very little worldly experience, is far too serious and knows little about girls and sexuality. Then on a short holiday in Wales with his best friend, Paul, they meet Eva and Sally who have summer jobs at a local hotel. Roy immediately finds himself falling in love for the first time with Eva. She finds her feelings torn; she is Czech, in the UK on sabbatical from Prague University, but the Prague Spring is in trouble and she feels that she ought to return home... The story moves between Britain and Czechoslovakia, not only to describe fully the true events of the Warsaw Pact invasion but especially to draw parallels between inner and outer worlds. This has now become a struggle for identity: a newly democratic nation is not tolerated by its neighbours while a young couple's love struggles against the intolerance of the whole world. We cannot know whether this relationship can survive as the stresses of life take their toll. At last, Eva commits herself to Roy and their love develops during one heady year of the late `sixties. However, there is not one character in this story who has not been profoundly changed by the year's events, and perhaps in the end there have been too many things hidden, unsaid or ambiguous...