Powsels and Thrums

‘I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration’ PHILIP PULLMAN

‘Entrancing … a creative manifesto’ TELEGRAPH

‘Mesmerising … vibrating with life and curiosity’ OBSERVER

In this lyrical and revelatory memoir, Alan Garner, Booker shortlisted author of Treacle Walker, traces the line of his life: from a working-class childhood in the landscape of Cheshire during World War II, through a grammar school education and on to the University of Oxford, and then home to see if he could become what he most desired: a writer.

We see the serendipitous moments that drove his course, from coming-of-age in a period of great cultural change, to crossing paths with a famous mathematician while out long-distance running, to the fateful day he chanced across Blackden, the medieval hall, miraculously located next to the giant telescope at Jodrell Bank, that was to become his lasting home and the setting for Treacle Walker.

As Garner tells us, a lifetime of working with a pen produces the powsels and thrums of research, imagination and story. These oddments can be shaped into something more than its parts: a vivid tapestry of a creative life that will inspire any reader, and what a celebration it is.

‘Advice is practical as well as profound … Garner is a magus. Read him’ Guardian

‘Offers a remarkable window into Garner’s mind and heart … Garner’s prose is as clear as glass’ Spectator

‘A creative manifesto … We are all the richer for it’ Byline Times

Reviews

Praise for Powsels and Thrums:

‘Who could resist such a title? … an evocative metaphor for the writings collected herein … These snippets, produced on the same magical loom, together attain a mesmerising wholeness, vibrating with life and curiosity, capturing both the pungently time-bound and the luminously eternal’ Observer

‘Thrilling … An author steeped in ancestral landscapes, alert to the history and dialects of his parish … Reading Garner’s essays one is reminded of other landscape-obsessives such as Tim Robinson … Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill, who could likewise sense the mythic England behind the everyday’ New Statesman

‘Offers a remarkable window into Garner’s mind and heart … You don’t have to know his work well to become immersed in this little book’ Spectator

‘This rich collection underlines the homogeneity of his life’s work: how themes and processes jostle against each other again and again – deep history, ancestry, cosmology, archaeology, anthropology, myth and legend. Mind-bending, but all of a piece’ Guardian

‘Here is a writer profoundly rooted in landscape … and one to whom landscape is endlessly legible … There’s magic here … It adds up to something like a creative manifesto’ Telegraph

‘A creative manifesto … We are all the richer for it’ Byline Times

‘Lyrical and rich … Alan Garner’s writing is part of the landscape of our own lives, of our childhoods and of our memories’ Stone Club