Wild Ground

Neef has always been a storyteller and her story now, working in a café in London, is that her name is Jennifer. Jennifer never knew a boy called Danny, never loved him, never had him wrenched away from her.

But when Neef was a teenager, and her troubled mother moved them into a flat above a pub in a working-class Yorkshire town, Danny was her whole world. Neef and Danny. Danny and Neef. Despite absent parents and small-town bigotry directed at Danny for the colour of his skin, they found solace in each other, convinced that Neef’s stories and Danny’s near-magic touch with plants would be their key to a different life. But as they got older, their dreams became tarnished by new distractions and new ways to forget themselves, eventually threatening to destroy them both.

Fifteen years later, Neef is Jennifer and determined to stay anonymous, until someone from her past appears to remind her of who she used to be. Confronted by the memories she fled from, Neef is forced to face the decisions she’s made and the person she’s become. At once heart-breaking and hopeful, Wild Ground shows us an all-consuming first love as it grapples with addiction, identity and class barriers. In this tender and moving debut, Emily Usher presents an aching love story impossible to forget.