Description
Set over 19 days in 2007, this is the story of PR man, Nick Golding, whose London agency, Prindle Massey, is on the brink of huge changes as the technology-led social media revolution threatens their very existence. The agency’s American owners decide to embrace new communications strategies but with the damage limitation offered by trying them out on charities and those in need first.Approaching middle age, Nick is finding it hard to relate to any of this, or even his own family. Behind his apparent cynicism is an unexplained fear of loss and he finds himself looking for clues to his unease from a childhood holiday, forty years earlier in 1967.Meanwhile, his wife, Nora, a marine archaeologist, who is similarly dissatisfied with their marriage, offers to help with an excavation at Waxling Beach, on England’s North Norfolk Coast, as part of the History and Mystery television series. The villagers’ livelihoods there are similarly threatened by their historic foe – the sea – leading the imposing, former RNLI coxswain, St John de Criel, to enlist Prindle Massey to help with their PR campaign for greater flood defences.As Waxling’s history of natural flooding and drowning is gradually revealed to be one accompanied by greed and self-interest, so Nick makes his own, unexpected discovery of a tragic past, and resolves to try to prevent events from repeating themselves. However, it might already be too late for the one young girl who is closer to him than any other.As Nick’s family seeks repair, so he realises that, regardless of time, place and motive, the true message of love and understanding is everything; all else is just driftwood on the beach.
