Based on the story of Christopher Jefferies, hounded by the press for a crime he didn’t commit, this is an elegiac exploration of trauma.
The poet Patrick McGuinness has always been interested in the hidden folds of our inner lives, the seams connecting present and past. As he admits in Other People’s Countries, his ingeniously fractured 2014 memoir about the sleepy Belgian town where he spent part of his childhood, “like a character in a Beckett play, I’ve always found the hardest words of all to be here and now”. In that book he described how his dressmaker grandmother would sew his school uniform, as ever paying particular attention to the lining or “doublure” (“the wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure”). Off he went to English public school, in a uniform that was secretly unique...