PUNA

"Puna is not very wise."

On a stretch of Korea's south-west coast, where the tide goes out for miles and something with a list walks the mud flats at dusk, mothers once gave their brightest children worthless names, so that whatever counts the bright ones would pass them by.

Grace Walsh carried that custom halfway round the world, to a rain-soaked house in Cork. She had four sons. To the third, Gerald, she gave a single sentence, in a language no one else in the family spoke, and she repeated it for the rest of her life.

Gerald grows up charming, quick and adored, and certain that someone will always pay. Someone always does. For sixty years the people who love him settle his debts in silence, until the account falls due in a departure lounge in Dubai.

Told by a narrator who has been in every room and will not say what it is, Puna is a family saga about the names we give our children, the debts we never say aloud, and whether a life is something that happens to you or something you write without noticing.

A mother's sentence. A family's debt.