Just glorious! If you’re inspired by new thoughts and feelings sparking into life and hanker after a book that is as wise and wonderful as it is moving and uplifting, then The Rising Down should go straight to the top of your reading list. Author Alexandra Harris began to explore, to dive deeply into the place she grew up, and found herself discovering a whole new world. She writes with the most beautifully eloquent pen, her words picked me up and remained a part of me as I read, with the final chapter sending goosebumps skittering down my arms and into my heart. The fascinating illustrations include photos, documents, letters, and appear throughout the book. The words brought to life an area I thought I already knew, however I will now look differently wherever I am, slow down to let my eyes wander and examine, to allow thoughts of how, and why, and what, to take hold. Although the focus is Sussex, in reality it encompasses every spot inhabited by humanity over the centuries. You don’t have to have stepped a foot onto the Sussex Downs in order to feel a connection with this book. I feel it would also traverse time, a hundred years ago a reader would exclaim at the very same things that I have. As well as the place, the people are brought to life, I felt how much they mattered and that they counted as an individual within this landscape. I was moved by their stories, by seeing their place in the world. As well as a Liz Pick of the month, The Rising Down also joins our LoveReading Star Books. I have fallen deeply in love with The Rising Down, it not only encourages a connection as it relates to people and place, it also moves and inspires. Highly recommended.
This luminous chronicle of lives in an English landscape over time is a feat of time travel from the prize-winning author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland.
An ancient church sheltering a medieval anchorite who chose to be buried alive.
The country estate parading a menagerie of exotic animals.
The cottage where William Blake received the poetic spirit of Milton.
A safe house harbouring secret agents from wartime French resistance networks.
When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all.
As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see?
From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters - spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada - inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape.
By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds 'a World in a Grain of Sand' by opening vast new horizons, becoming our intimate companion as we travel on visionary journeys through space and time. The result is a masterpiece of 'scholarship at its life-enhancing best' (Independent) which reveals that nowhere is simply one place :and gives us all new bearings.
‘I will return and return to The Rising Down. I haven’t read anything at all like it before. The imaginative intelligence at work here makes the landscape of Sussex come to life. A masterpiece of observation, detection, and meditation.’ Fiona Stafford, author of The Brief Life of Flowers
‘Passionate and erudite. Harris ranges back and forth through centuries of natural and local history, looking for traces of individual lives and listening for distinctive human voices in the archives, architecture, literature and art . . . Humane, humorous and joyful.’ Ruth Scurr, author of Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows
‘A history of a patch of England that contains in it the history of a country, an Empire, and its people. In a book that transcends the distinctions of life-writing, fiction and history, Harris asks what it means to inhabit a place . . . a brilliant and moving masterpiece.’ Daisy Hay, author of Dinner with Joseph Johnson
'A joy to read.' Sunday Times
'Breathtaking.' Guardian
'Highly eclectic and original.' Sunday Telegraph
'Hugely ambitious.' TLS
'The wit and wonder of an exceptional literary work.' New Statesman
'An inspiring guide.' Daily Mail
Author
About Alexandra Harris
Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and is now Professor of English at the University of Birmingham.
Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (2010) won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize.
Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, adapted for BBC Radio 4 and chosen ten times as a ‘Book of the Year’.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers as well as judging literary prizes, writing for exhibition catalogues, working with artists, lecturing widely and speaking on the radio.
