It is the hot summer of 1981 and Catherine is laid low by childhood illness, stuck inside the sprawling Victorian mansion at the foot of the mountain. Confined to her sickbed with fever, she can only look down into the garden and observe the goings-on upon the lawn, or lie back and listen to the hushed conversations in the hall. Sam and Rosa, her two elder teenage cousins, have come to spend the school holiday in this seemingly idyllic setting, and Catherine finds herself secretly longing for the brief visits Sam makes to her room. But when Rosa falls in love with Humberto, a twenty-year-old Spanish man camping in the grounds of the house, and Catherine witnesses a violent attack on Sam's beloved dog, the events of that summer take on a darker hue. Even as Catherine's parents are caused to confront their marriage, and find themselves radically altered, she herself begins her fight for a life void of any more responsibility or surprises. In this many-twisted tale, the truth is a kaleidoscope of fractured understandings which crystallise over the course of the summer. The consequences of those events back in the year of Charles and Diana's wedding will reverberate in everyone's lives, for better or worse, for years to come, reaching their final resolution in the summer of 2008 as a much older and wiser Catherine sits waiting for Rosa on an Edinburgh doorstep. Under the Mountain is a fiercely intelligent and beautifully written novel about domestic politics and first loves, and in an unforgettable narrative that is both moving and haunting, Sophie Cooke powerfully exposes hidden inner lives and reveals the sometimes devastating consequences of love and the lies it can tell.

A remarkable and thought-provoking book, it poses deep questions about the way we engage with the world in all its violence and beauty.