Peculiar Ground - Softcover

‘A rich layering of history and fiction ... Erudite, elegant but easy-going ... One of the best novels of the year so far’ The Times

‘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

‘So clever and beautifully written, it gripped me from start to end. I abandoned work and family to finish it’ Roddy Doyle

Unlike anything I’ve read. With its broad scope and its intimacy and exactness, it cuts through the apparatus of life to the vivid moment’ Tessa Hadley

‘Hughes-Hallett’s ambitious first novel dances between past and present, history and modernity ... magically and movingly evoked, and remains in the imagination long after the reader passes beyond its gates’ New Statesman

‘Ambitious and accomplished ... a polyphonic narrative ... rich with detail ... leaves you hoping that this late conversion to fiction will prove only the beginning’ Observer

‘A sensual meditation on the nature of paradise’ Mail on Sunday

‘A teeming, heaving whirligig of a novel... Hughes-Hallett retains terrific control of her subject matter in a novel beautifully alert to the repeating patterns of personal and political history’ Daily Mail

‘Happy, tragic, ever expanding and literally ground-breaking’ Spectator

‘Characters to get involved with, stories to follow – perfect to get lost in’ Woman & Home

‘That rare thing: a fresh classic. Ambitious, satisfying and mature, Peculiar Ground is spellbinding’ Country Life

‘Richly imagined, impressively detailed ... admirably ambitious and well written ... original and intriguing’ Sunday Times

‘Richly evocative’ Tatler

‘Elegant, inventive, mystical’ Daily Telegraph

It is the seventeenth century, and a wall is being raised around Wychwood, transforming the great house and its park into a private realm of ornamental lakes, grandiose gardens, and majestic avenues designed by Mr. Norris, a visionary landscaper. In this enclosed world, everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war. Dissenters shelter in the woods, lovers rendezvous in secret enclaves, and outsiders--migrants fleeing the plague--find no mercy.

Three centuries later, far away in Berlin, another wall is raised. At Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one hot, languorous weekend in 1961 is overshadowed by news of historic change. Young Nell, whose father manages the estate, grows up amid dramatic upheavals as the house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War wanes, a threat from a different kind of conflict reaches Wychwood's walls.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett conjures an intricately structured, captivating story that explores the lives of gamekeepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats; the exuberance of young love and the pathos of aging; and the way those who try to wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.

With poignancy and grace, she illuminates a place where past and present are inextricably linked by stories, legends, and history--and by one patch of peculiar ground.