The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry

He passed along the line of huts, head down. Some people were still outside, enjoying the night air, smoking the last cigarette of the day. Others were inside, and he could see their shadowy figures through the glass, eating, drinking wine, reading a novel, playing cards.
Our older daughter and her family have a beach hut on the Essex coast so I couldn’t resist dipping into this book to capture those memories of sandcastles, wind breaks, grandchildren body-boarding in wet-suits, going crabbing, brewing tea in the hut and sitting outside, just like my grandparents did in a sepia photograph taken in the 1930s along the same beach.
The Beach Hut is a compilation of fourteen short stories, some of them skilfully interwoven, about the lives of those spending their summers on the north Devon coast.
Veronica Henry writes: 'It was a writer’s dream watching the dramas unfold behind the weather-beaten walls – the only problem was going to be where to stop…'
At first I found the stories too ‘full-on’: the bored young girl typing for a selfish novelist who seduces her, a married woman embarking on an affair, an alcoholic coming to terms with the past. But I persevered and other stories about a single parent and her handicapped son and a widow scattering her husband’s ashes seemed all the more poignant.
I liked the structure of the book – each story is given the title of the possible name of a hut – but I can’t say ‘I wished I was there’. Apart from Roy and Harry, I didn’t really care enough for any of the other characters to wonder what might happen to them once summer faded.