The Loney

Andrew Michael Hurley

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

Two brothers. One mute, the other his lifelong protector.

Year after year, their family visits the same sacred shrine on a desolate strip of coastline known as the Loney, in desperate hope of a cure.

In the long hours of waiting, the boys are left alone. And they cannot resist the causeway revealed with every turn of the treacherous tide, the old house they glimpse at its end...

Many years on, Hanny is a grown man no longer in need of his brother's care.

But then the child's body is found.

And the Loney always gives up its secrets, in the end

The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller. Winner of the 2015 Costa First Novel Award. The British Book Awards book of the year 2016.

'A masterclass in spinning out tension.'

'This is a novel of the unsaid, the implied, the barely grasped or understood, crammed with dark holes and blurry spaces that your imagination feels compelled to fill.'

Review by Ben Macnair (010825) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
The Loney is one of those novels that takes elements from a lot of genres. This is a family history, a magic realism story, a brooding, slow burning horror story, a story about religion, faith and hope, and it skips between pathos, horror and tragedy with ease.

An unnamed narrator, now working in a down at heel museum sees a story in a paper, and it takes him back to the family holidays that he shared with his religious parents, their friends, and the Parish’s new vicar, and his disabled brother, Andrew, at the Loney, a remote farm house in a remote village in Wales. So far, so ordinary, but the Loney has deep dark secrets, and long buried memories for the brothers and their parents, as well as being the scene of acts that defy all rational explanation, and it is in this act, that the beguiling power of the novel rests.

This is not an all-out horror story, there is no gore, but there is a definite, and very well-maintained sense of foreboding throughout, from both the situation, and the geographical area in which the book is set. There are no hysterical characters, and nothing out of place or extra-ordinary, it is just a family in a situation that is far from the everyday.

There is much to discuss in this book, from the handling of Andrew’s disability, and the closeness to the brother’s, and how they each individually handled the events that unfold during one summer, and how time and fate conspired to make them both face it again as adults.
Ben Macnair (1st August 2025)