Fiction:If Booker short-listed author Trezza Azzopardi has a recognisable territory it is those lives conducted on the margins. The Hiding Place, her debut novel, which made it on to the Booker shortlist as a rank outsider in 2000, drew on her own background growing up in an immigrant community - she is half-Maltese - in 1950s Wales. Remember Me, her second novel, followed elderly bag lady Winnie as she sets out to win back her few pathetic belongings, a journey that becomes a painstaking reconstruction of a lost self.
In Winterton Blue, there are two lost characters, Lewis and Anna, one deeply disturbed by the events of the past, the other suffering from partial deafness, which puts them both at a necessary distance from the world. Lewis is a drifter, haunted by a joyriding episode of his youth in which his twin brother, Wayne, was drowned when the car plunged into the water. He is set upon assigning blame for Wayne's death and wreaking murderous revenge on the person he believes is responsible; what he discovers at the end of his therapeutic quest is a truth altogether different from the one he has pieced together from the jigsaw of memories that constantly assail and threaten to undo him.
Anna is in her 40s, a freelance art teacher, a solitary, uneasy woman. Her deafness is so subtly adumbrated by Azzopardi that the reader is never quite sure whether her tentative hold on life is due to a failure to make sense of her history, or simply that she has missed some of the clues because she could not hear. Her unsuitable mother - in Anna's estimation - a colourful, eccentric lush who runs a boarding house in Yarmouth, and her companion, long-term lodger Vernon Savoy, a former music hall ventriloquist, provide an alternative and essentially comic take to the more lugubrious reality of the central characters.
WHEN HER MOTHER has a fall, Anna is called home to look after her and it is in the boarding house that she meets Lewis. The two glance off one another, aware of the spark of connection between them. But though they have found one another, Azzopardi doesn't reach for the obvious redemption-of-love solution between two damaged people, though she doesn't entirely close the door on it.
If all this sounds like relentless grim realism, that would be to underestimate the power of the writing. Make no mistake, this is a solemn read, but what saves Winterton Blue from being another downbeat, care-in-the-community novel is Azzopardi's limpid prose and her lyrical sense of place. The narrative may be necessarily broken because of her characters' state of mind, but the world as viewed through their eyes is startling and arresting. The sea - a constant presence in the novel - is tripe-grey or like tinfoil or the hue of a pigeon's wing; the sky the colour of raw dough or ice, the light as if "stowed under tissue paper"; the sun "like a silver coin". Even the landscape, the east coast of England, seems to echo the characters' interior perils. The tumble-down house where Anna chooses to live at the end of the novel is right at the edge of land and subject to coastal erosion, so that the only certainty about it is that it will eventually topple into the sea.
UNLIKELY URBAN SITES take on a fierce and mysterious beauty in Azzopardi's hands - the wind turbines that stand tantalisingly in the sea, visible on the horizon from Yarmouth, take on a mythical quality. But neither Lewis nor Anna can tilt at them - they become a shimmering Shangri-La embodying a dangerous perfection that cannot be attained, since both nurture a morbid fear of water.
But the difficulty with characters such as Lewis and Anna is that they are essentially solipsistic and if they find it hard to sustain connections with others, their hold on the reader is equally fractured. One feels concern for them, but not empathy. While Winterton Blue has bleak Beckettian overtones, it lacks his wintry humour. Azzopardi relies on the eccentric duo of Anna's mother and her flamboyant lover to leaven the fare. And for all Rita and Vernon's boozy denial and willed foolishness, their gritty refusal to conform ends up looking like the sage, untutored wisdom that Lewis and Anna are seeking.
That said, the atmosphere of Winterton Blue lingers, as much because of the physical territory it covers - the mean London bed-sits, the "withered grandeur" of the Yarmouth boarding house, the graffiti-scrawled sink estate in Cardiff where Lewis has grown up - for it is as much about the power of modest, unregarded places to resonate as it is about overlooked, unremarkable lives.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short story writer
Winterton Blue By Trezza Azzopardi Picador 268pp. £12.99