Preview: Victory Point by Owen D. Pomery / Avery Hill Publishing

When Avery Hill announced their 2020 line-up, one of the books that stood out to us was Victory Point, with its beautiful cover by award-winning architectural illustrator Owen D Pomery. When you see a cover like that and know that the art inside will be of the same standard, you can't help but be intrigued by the book.

The story is set in the 1930s in the fictional village of Victory Point - the site of a failed architectural experiment where the only people who live there now are the people who choose to live there. It's going to be an interesting village to explore in the pages of this book! 

Check out the details below, including some preview pages. Let us know what you think of this idea.

Victory Point 
Published by Avery Hill Publishing 
11th June (UK) / 18th July (USA) 
Hardback, 80 pages 
£14.99 / $18.95 

Award-winning architectural illustrator Owen D Pomery presents Victory Point: once an ambitious Modernist seaside haven, now a forgotten coastal oddity. Against this extraordinary fictional backdrop, Pomery examines how we live, what we leave behind and how we choose to be remembered.

In the 1930s, the village of Victory Point was selected as the site of an architectural experiment. Funded by both the government and private investors, they appointed modernist architect M.L Schreiber to redesign the town on modernist principles, creating an exemplar of ‘how to live’. Lack of public interest meant the development had to reduce the scale of its ambition, and what remains today is a quiet, coastal oddity. Now it is merely home to those that chose to live there...

On a summer’s day, Ellen returns to her coastal hometown – the picturesque, yet architecturally strange, Victory Point. Revisiting old haunts and people from her past, she feels both disconnected from her previous life and exhausted by the constant struggle of ‘swimming upstream’ to forge her way ahead.

Exploring the town, performing a thought experiment in how to live, Ellen searches for some comfort in her own history that might give her the strength to move forward.

Victory Point quietly explores the idea of how we choose to live and be remembered. It ultimately asks whether we should strive for a higher calling, or if a simple, domestic legacy is the most honest and admirable achievement we can hope for – and if the land from which we disembark feels as alien as the one we hope to reach, how does anyone make their peace with a life amongst the ever-changing ocean waves?