Every weekend, we delve into the British backlist and recommend a book for you. This week’s suggestion was a Richard and Judy book club pick in 2013.

Here’s what they had to say about it:
“What a debut from Joanna Rossiter. The Sea Change is a haunting, utterly compelling story centred on the beautiful village of Imber, which was – and is – hidden in a fold on Salisbury Plain. Imber is destined to become a community of ghosts. Overnight.

Rossiter’s tale flip-flops from 1940s war-torn England to 1970s India and a devastating tsunami that engulfs one of Imber’s lost descendants. We think it’s a triumph of storytelling.”

Yesterday was Alice’s wedding day. She is thousands of miles away from the home she is so desperate to leave, on the southernmost tip of India, when she wakes in the morning to see a wave on the horizon, taller than the height of her guest house on Kanyakumari beach. Her husband is nowhere to be seen.

On the other side of the world, unhappily estranged from her daughter, is Alice’s mother, Violet. Forced to leave the idyllic Wiltshire village, Imber, in which she grew up after it was requisitioned by the army during the Second World War, Violet is haunted by the shadow of the man she loved and the wilderness of a home that lies in ruins.

As Alice searches for her husband in the debris of the wave she is forced to face up to some truths about herself she has been hiding from. Meanwhile Violet is compelled to return to Imber to discover just why she abandoned her great love . . .

The Sea Change is available here in the US and, in the UK, here or via your local bookshop.