Elmet
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017
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4.1 • 42 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
Fresh and distinctive writing from an exciting new voice in fiction, Elmet is an unforgettable novel about family, as well as a beautiful meditation on landscape.
Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful. They lived apart in the house that Daddy built for them with his bare hands. They foraged and hunted. When they were younger, Daniel and Cathy had gone to school. But they were not like the other children then, and they were even less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and would return with a rage in his eyes. But when he was at home he was at peace. He told them that the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. But that wasn't true. Local men, greedy and watchful, began to circle like vultures. All the while, the terrible violence in Daddy grew.
Atmospheric and unsettling, Elmet is a lyrical commentary on contemporary society and one family's precarious place in it, as well as an exploration of how deep the bond between father and child can go.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Elmet—shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize—is a hypnotic read. Fiona Mozley paints a visceral and darkly poetic Yorkshire that forces you to feel the bruising physicality of its characters, taste its food and fear its unforgiving landscape. We track Daniel and his sister Cathy, who live with their father in a house they built together on land they don’t own. What follows is a Northern Noir of the most sensational quality: a tragic and ageless tale of family disputes, community and ownership, tinged with the occult.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mozley's debut, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, is a rugged, potent work whose concentrated mixture of lyricism and violence recalls Cormac McCarthy. A taciturn giant of a man, a bare-knuckle fighter who is the "fastest and toughest... in Britain and Ireland," builds a house for himself and his two children in the Yorkshire woods, where "the soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through." In this secluded spot, he attempts to strengthen his two children, a slight, observant boy and an indomitable girl, "against the dark things of the world." Dark things soon intrude as the family becomes embroiled in a bitter dispute with a villainous local landowner and his two entitled sons. That conflict generates overheated scenes of gore and overlong speeches that dissipate the novel's power. There are nevertheless many eerily beautiful scenes, particularly one in which the grizzled father rigs up rustic Christmas lights deep in an ancient copse. Mozley is best when describing the tight-knit family in its isolated splendor, creating, and then clinging to, their "strange, sylvan otherworld."
