Tom Pinder, Foundling: A Story of the Holmfirth Flood

On a freezing winter night in the West Yorkshire hills, a shepherd discovers a woman half-dead in the snow, an infant clutched to her breast. So begins Tom Pinder's journey through a world that refuses to let him forget he was never wanted. Raised in the shadow of the Pennines among working folk whose lives are governed by poverty, the cooperative movement, and the looming presence of the reservoirs above their valley, Tom grows up hungry for the identity the world denies him. When the ancient dam finally gives way and a wall of water tears through Holmfirth, it doesn't just destroy homes and livelihoods, it cracks open the secrets of Tom's birth and forces the community to reckon with what they've always known but never spoken. Sykes writes with raw Yorkshire dialect and fierce tenderness about the forgotten people of industrial England, the foundlings and factory hands and publicans who built their own families from whatever wreckage life left behind. This is a novel about what it means to belong nowhere and everywhere at once.