ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – Getting Away by Kate Sawyer

Posted on 11th August 2025 By Nicola

Getting Away by Kate Sawyer is published by Zaffre and is out now. I bought my copy with the fabulous spredges.

Margaret Smith is at the beach.

It is a summer day unlike any other Margaret has ever known.

The Smith family have left the town where they live and work and go to school and come to a place where the sky is blue, the sand is white, and the sound of the sea surrounds them. An ordinary family discovering the joy of getting away for the first time.

Over the course of the coming decades, they will be transformed through their holiday experiences, each new destination a backdrop as the family grows and changes, love stories begin and end — and secrets are revealed.

Getting Away is a dazzlingly ambitious new novel from the author of Waterstones’ Fiction Book of the Month, This Family, and the Costa shortlisted The Stranding.

Getting Away is about all the holidays we take throughout our lives, from the simple trip to the beach with family to the fancy holidays abroad. It’s also about the family dynamics that occur, just like when any family gets together. We see the holidays through the eyes of the Smith family taking us from the 1930s through to the 2020s.

I knew as soon as I heard about the premise that I wanted to read this book and I absolutely adored every bit of it. Sometimes a book that skips through time in this way, linking the characters by events, doesn’t work so well as it misses out some of what has happened to them in the meantime (between holidays in this case) but Kate Sawyer does a wonderful job at following the characters through the years, letting the reader know what has happened to them not by simply telling them, but by revealing it slowly through their actions and feelings, with tiny details and what is left unsaid allowing us to read between the lines. I came to care about all the characters and looked forward to seeing them through each decade.

There are some lovely strands running throughout. In the 1930s it all begins with Betty and Jim and the spectres of WWI and a lost love. The family continues through their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and I felt like I knew them all really well by the end.

Getting Away is a social history of everyday life and the power of the holiday, and it is also a multi-generational, beautifully portrayed family story. It’s easy to read (I powered through it) but is also emotional and full of nostalgia. I found it very hard to put it down. It’s absolutely perfect and is easily one of my favourite books of this year.

Kate Sawyer worked as an actor and producer before writing several short films then turning her hand to fiction. Her second novel This Family was a Waterstones Book Of The Month and Paperback of the Year. Her debut, The Stranding, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the East Anglian Book Award for fiction, was adapted for BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and is being developed for the screen. Kate produces the annual Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival, in the Suffolk town she grew up in and returned to after the birth of her daughter.