The Undertow

By: Jo Baker

Narrated by: Anna Bentinck

This is the story of the Hasting family - their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks - captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the first World War and the present.

The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy.… His son Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle.… His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s.… And finally, young Billie Hastings makes a life for herself as an artist in contemporary London. Just as the names echo down through the family, so too does the legacy of choices made, chances lost, and truths long buried.

©2012 Jo Baker (P)2012 AudioGO

A wonderful 4-generation family saga.

This book carries us through four generations of the Hastings family. Young Will Hastings goes off to WWI and sends his wife postcards from every place he is sent. He doesn’t return from war. His son, Billy, grows up with bicycle racing and then goes off to WWII. He survives the war but is a damaged man. He takes his anger out on his own son, Will, who has to overcome a crippling condition, and who is the first one in the family to go to college-he goes to Oxford and ultimately becomes a professor there and marries a girl far above his class, as seen by his family. And then we see his own daughter, Billie, grow up. The range of the book goes from 1914 to 2005. An excellent book.