LoveReading Says
Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018
A huge book both in scope and length, it begins with the journals of a landscape gardener building a great park in 1663 then moves to 1961 and follows the lives of a large group of friends and extended family up to 1989. Complex relationships, infidelities, petty betrayals, great loves play out against the grand landscape. Occasional first person inserts by different characters add a depth to the narrative and a new perspective to the situations. The writing is lovely and now and then a turn of phrase would stop me in my tracks. It is a novel of parallels, AIDS to black plague, storm to change, sanctuary to prison, spying for Russia to informing for Cromwell. The psychological aspects of a wall; is it keeping something in or keeping something out? It’s a good read, a family drama on the surface but the literary style and symbolism means there is far more depth to it. A book of layers and levels, leading to unexpected places, just as the path through hedges will suddenly open to a stunning view. It is the first novel from a renowned historian and writer of non-fiction. Great stuff.
If you like Lucy Hughes-Hallett you might also like to read books by John Boyne, Ian McEwan and L. R. Fredericks.
Sarah Broadhurst
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Peculiar Ground Synopsis
A Kirkus Best Book of 2018
"Unlike anything I've read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It's wonderful."--Tessa Hadley
The Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement--a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion.
It is the seventeenth century and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders--migrants fleeing the plague--find no mercy.
Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood's walls.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history--and by one patch of peculiar ground.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780062684202 |
| Publication date: |
8th January 2019 |
| Author: |
Lucy HughesHallett |
| Publisher: |
Harper Perennial an imprint of HarperCollins |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
480 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction
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| Other Genres: |
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