Peculiar Ground
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- 6,49 €
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- 6,49 €
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‘One of the best novels of the year so far’ The Times
A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’ Tessa Hadley
‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip Pullman
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.
About the author
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award. Before that, she wrote Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions which was published in 1990 to wide acclaim, and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen, published in 2004, which garnered similar praise. Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and the Emily Toth Award. Lucy lives in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Author of an acclaimed biography of the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, Hughes-Hallet offers an enjoyable, sprawling epic debut about an enclosed paradise. Populated by a large cast, its subject is singular: Wychwood, a lavish English country estate that weathers centuries of upheavals, from civil war to its transformation into a theme park for the aristocrat-obsessed. The novel concentrates on two historical eras. The 17th-century scenes, which bookend the novel, focus on John Norris, a prim landscape architect with extravagant Eden-like visions for the estate. Magnificent though his designs may be, the outside world creeps in, notably in the form of tragic accidents and the plague that ravaged England in 1665. These sections, which include flourishes of historical and cultural detail (witchcraft, folklore, secret religious sects), paint a vivid picture. The novel's middle episodes, which check in on the fast-living set congregating at Wychwood during key moments throughout the Cold War, are the highlight: consistently witty, they are reminiscent of another country house saga, Alain Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. Hughes-Hallett effectively expands the domestic drama to touch on class resentment, religious conflict, and international affairs. Her Wychwood is a remarkable, ambivalent creation, "at once a sanctuary and place of internment," and readers will delight at strolling its grounds under her guidance. Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled Wychwood.
