Twelve-year-old May lives with her younger brother and her mother, Lucy, in a big house by the sea. Lucy is running it as a guesthouse having left behind a failed marriage in London. In the weeks before Christmas, a writer and his glamorous editor arrive, shortly followed by May's father and all the delicate new possibilities stirring in their lives are threatened. BY THE SHORE is May's story of those weeks, of the apparantly simple concerns of her own life and of the bigger, more complex events around her. Destined to become a classic, BY THE SHORE is a novel of childhood and all the subtleties of a young girl's understanding, all the terrors, the embarrassments and all the longings.