Perfect / Rachel Joyce 385 pp.

12-year-old Byron has a seemingly idyllic life in 1970s England, until one morning he and his mother have an accident.  Or do they?  Byron struggles to understand what's happened, while his mother slowly falls apart.  Poignant but not depressing, and a little mysterious, this is a sweet, sensitive story of a boy in over his head and the adults who fail him.  Much of the drama centers around the musical afternoons of piano playing and singing that his mother organizes with her new, possibly malevolent, friend.