LISTEN

 

The death of a childhood friend leads a radio producer to a US military surveillance base on a bleak Yorkshire moor where she begins to question the base’s activities and their treatment of the women peace protesters camped nearby.

Autumn 1996: Sarah Braithwaite hits fifty and spirals into mid-life crisis. Her only child leaves home, her partner insists on renovating their dilapidated North London house and at the BBC a new young boss, Caz, dismisses her as an ageing Sixties feminist. Sarah’s documentaries once won prizes, but now she’s been sidelined into producing short stories. When an elderly woman submits an Orwellian story about an expanding US military base which, the woman claims, is illegally intercepting UK telecommunications traffic, Sarah rejects her as paranoid and her story as rubbish. The woman, undeterred, continues to harass her with urgent requests for help with “a girl in danger” but Sarah – her life in free-fall – refuses to listen.

 

The unexpected news of the death of her childhood friend, Lucy Jepson, prompts Sarah to escape back to her roots in the north where she learns that Lucy, flamboyant heiress to an industrial fortune, has died, poor and alone, on a derelict smallholding. Shocked by the circumstances surrounding Lucy’s death Sarah embarks on a search to find out how she came to die. Her turbulent journey takes her through suburban and rural North Yorkshire, the evidence leading her ever closer to the sinister American base, RAF Menwin Moor; the same base that Erin, the woman she had so carelessly dismissed, had repeatedly tried to bring to her attention. Realising that Erin, far from being paranoid, is a distinguished peace activist in conflict with the powerful National Security Agency who run the base, her search takes a disturbing new turn. Who is the “girl in danger” Erin has mentioned? If she is to resolve her own life Sarah must find out how her friend died, and try to save the girl. And to do that she must penetrate the male bastion of the base at its most vulnerable point.