The Last Summer of the Water Strider by Tim Lott – a boy comes of age in the 70s

A grieving teenager finds solace on a riverboat with his hippy uncle in an extremely likable book set during the comedown from the 60s

Set over one long hot summer of the 1970s, The Last Summer of the Water Strider is the coming-of-age story of Adam, a bored 17-year-old living with his mum and dad in a London council flat. Outside is a world of platform boots, patchouli and zen; inside, Terry and June is on the TV, and all is tedium and beigeness.

Adam’s father, Ray, works in a shoe shop; Evie, his mother, is little more than a kindly hovering presence. The monotony is disturbed by a visit from Ray’s brother, Henry, who arrives “one monochrome afternoon, on a late-winter day stillborn by a sterile, uncommitted sun”. Henry, as determinedly interesting as his brother is determinedly ordinary, is “out of touch with what Ray likes to think of as reality”. Long considered by the rest of the family to be a reprobate and idiot, he turns out to be a well-groomed, urbane old hippy with a gentle humour and undertones of gravitas. When he quotes poetry Adam’s parents are uneasy, “as if culture itself were another dangerous narcotic that would get you into trouble sooner or later”.

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