Some men are remembered as heroes. Thomas Hargraves earned it — a young man who went to fight fascism in Spain, who pulled his neighbours from the rubble of the Manchester Blitz, and who spent the rest of his long life building a charity that lifted thousands out of hardship. When he dies, his journalist grandson David comes north to bury him and to write the newspaper tribute the great man deserves.

But in the locked study of the old house in Salford, among the journals and letters no-one was ever meant to read, David finds another Thomas, and a secret kept for almost seventy years. A truth that would honour the forgotten and right an old, terrible wrong. A truth that would also destroy everything his grandfather built, and everyone still living in its shadow.

With his article already at the printers and the whole city preparing to mourn a saint, David must decide what a life is worth, and who has the right to tell it. Moving from the olive groves of Jarama to the firestorms of wartime Manchester to a grey Salford seventy years on, The Centre Cannot Hold is a haunting, beautifully controlled novel about loyalty and inheritance, and the quiet devastation of the stories we choose to tell, and the ones we choose to bury.