His art reaches out from the society of ancestors.Thursbitch is the name of a valley in the south Pennines not far from Macclesfield, and Garner’s novel, published in 2003 but long in the making, gives the location a powerfully threatening and magical character. The experience of reading Thursbitch is so overwhelming that, after closing the book, it remains more real than anything around one. There is more meaning and worth in a single paragraph of Alan Garner than in much of the pale, thin stuff that passes for contemporary English fiction Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman with trepidation undoubtedly but also with a transforming, youthful hope Independent His art reaches out from the society of ancestors. Garner's book is only a slim volume, yet in the ideas and possibilities it suggests, it punches well above its weight Sunday Herald The land does indeed seem alive thanks to Garner's acute sense of place and his delight in language.This novel crackles with linguistic life Sunday Times 'Eerie and immaculately written' Olivia Laing, Observer Read moreĮerie and immaculately written Olivia Laing, ObserverĪ rare flight of the imagination - and an unforgettable book Metro This poetic, fantastical novel is is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.

Walking on the moor one day they slip between time and are lost somewhere between Jack's vanished world and their own. In the twenty-first century, two hundred and fifty years after John's life, Ian and Sal's world resounds with the echo John's death. John brought ideas as well as gifts, from market town to market town, from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. With his train of horses he carried salt and silk, travelling distances incomprehensible to his community. So reads an enigmatic memorial stone, high on the bank of a prehistoric Pennine track in Cheshire, a mystery that lives on in the surrounding hill farms. The print of a woman's shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead. Here John Turner was cast away in a heavy snow storm in the night in or about the year 1755. A powerful and deeply felt narrative - Thursbitch resonates with liminal, potent songs' Financial TimesĪ gripping time-slip novel by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-longlisted Treacle Walker

Thursbitch by Alan Garner