Peculiar Ground

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018 It is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate. Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all. Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival by the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and a Great Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall comes down, a fatwa signals a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks safety in Wychwood. From the multi-award-winning author of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in. 'Extraordinarily accomplished ... absolutely involving, thanks to beautiful description and a very fine understanding of human emotion ... Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance ... Humane, thoughtful, compelling and packed with magic, this is a remarkable achievement' - Guardian A historian, biographer and critic, Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other non-fiction books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Peculiar Ground is her first novel.

Best Price: £8.99 from Waterstones