Follow Me To Ground
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'A tangled, gnarled, wonderfully original, strange, beautiful beast of a book'
DAISY JOHNSON, author of Everything Under
'Beautiful and terrifying' SUNDAY TIMES
'Seethingly assured debut fuses magical realism with critical and feminist theory' GUARDIAN
In house in a wood, Ada and her father live peacefully, tending to their garden and the wildlife in it. They are not human though. Ada was made by her father from the Ground, a unique patch of earth with birthing and healing properties. Though perhaps he didn’t get her quite right. They spend their days healing the local human folk – named Cures - who visit them, suspiciously, with their ailments.
When Ada embarks on a relationship with a local Cure named Samson, and is forced to choose between her old life with her father, and a new one with her human lover. Her decision will uproot the town – and the Ground itself – for ever.
A poised and simmering tour-de-force, FOLLOW ME TO GROUND is a sinister vision of desire and freewill, voiced in earthy prose and eviscerating detail by an astoundingly original new writer.
'Equal parts beauty and horror, and unlike anything you will read this year’ TEA OBREHT
'Fierce, palpable, hynoptic. A dazzling, troubling dream' COLIN BARRETT
'A writer to watch' METRO
'An astonishing debut heralding the career of an exciting new writer. Strange, lyrical, and arresting, this novel will draw readers into its extraordinary spell.' KIRKUS starred review
LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE 2019
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brimming with dark folklore and underworld energy, Rainsford's stellar debut features a memorable heroine chafing against her monstrous isolation. Ada and her father are vegetal creatures born of the Ground, a special patch of hungry earth that "gorge on bodies" and shapes "them to its own liking." They are strange, slowly aging beings who live apart from the human population, or "Cures," but are tolerated for their extraordinary healing capacity. Ada and her father can open up bodies and sing away sickness; the most serious cases are put into the Ground to heal, though the results are unpredictable. Rainsford excels in describing the grotesque beauty of this alternative medicine in which the humming healers feel their "way to the pitch of hurt." The novel alternates between short sections in which various Cures describe their impressions of Ada, the lonely young creature with an "unseeded" heart, and Ada's own narration of her rapturous affair with a young man named Samson. Ada tries to hide the romance from her disapproving father, who sees Samson's longing for Ada, as well as his intense relationship with his pregnant sister, Olivia, as indicative of a diseased nature too poisonous even for the Ground to cleanse. This is a subtle, unsettling novel in which desire is an ineradicable sickness that can be preferable to health.
