An audio book. YA.
Because his mother's away that weekend, Louie, a young teenager, goes with his engineer father Philip and his colleagues Miles and Valentina to a remote pumping station. A maintenance job.
His brother Toby had been killed by an uninsured young driver who died from his injuries. His mother never really recovered, and left.
There's an earthquake then a tsunami. Graves are flooded, disrupted. The engineers get home then all but Miles return as volunteers. There are ghosts. Louie hears Toby. The locals need to talk about those they've lost (especially if the death was unexpected/violent), even if the listener doesn't understand the language. Louie becomes a listener. His father, a devout materialist, is troubled by the ghosts. Toby is angry with him for not opening up about his grief - to him, but especially to his mother.
Louie is encouraged by Toby to use a conveniently abandoned digger to clear a cave mouth. Once he's done so he feels spirits brush past. He and his father feel a weight lifted. They return to mother's home to find that she's made a room into a shrine for Toby. They become a family again.
I feared that Louie would mediate between his parents, making them see sense. It's more subtle than that, an extended parable whose message is There are various ways to cope with the irrational. One should accept that others have different ways of dealing with loss - sometimes people just want to talk about it, repeatedly, even to strangers. The old ways might still work.. It's Louie's first-person PoV so it's a surprise that he uses words like "cadaverous", "politenesses" and "baleful".
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