Synopses & Reviews
The village of Marsdale is a quiet corner of the world, cradled in a remote dale in England's lovely Lake District. The rhythm of life in the deeply religious, sheltered community has not changed for centuries. But in 1936, when Waterworks representative Jack Ligget from industrial Manchester arrives with plans to build a new reservoir, he brings the much feared threat of impending change to this bucolic hamlet. And when he begins an intense and troubled affair with Janet Lightburn a devout local woman of rare passion and strength of spirit it can only lead to scandal, tragedy, and remarkable, desperate acts.
From Sarah Hall, the internationally acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize finalist The Electric Michelangelo, comes a stunning and transcendent novel of love, obsession, and the passing of an age.
Review
"Sharing thematic parallels with...Lady Chatterley's Lover, Commonwealth Award-winning Hall's outstanding debut novel is beautifully rendered and offers rich meditations on nature, community, passion, and love." Booklist
Review
"Hall paints her scenes in dark, symbolic, sometimes overwrought prose, straining for mythic overtones....A portentous debut, but this winner of the Commonwealth Best First Novel Award is proof of a literary talent with more to come." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
"Here is a writer of show-stopping genius: everyone should buy this novel."--The Guardian
A remote village is threatened by industrialization and by a scandalous love affair in this debut novel by the author of Burntcoat and the Man Booker Prize finalist The Electric Michelangelo
The village of Marsdale is a quiet corner of the world, cradled in a remote dale in England's lovely Lake District. The rhythm of life in the deeply religious, sheltered community has not changed for centuries. But in 1936, when Waterworks representative Jack Ligget from industrial Manchester arrives with plans to build a new reservoir, he brings the much feared threat of impending change to this bucolic hamlet. And when he begins an intense and troubled affair with Janet Lightburn--a devout local woman of rare passion and strength of spirit--it can only lead to scandal, tragedy, and remarkable, desperate acts.
From Sarah Hall, the internationally acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize finalist The Electric Michelangelo, comes a stunning and transcendent novel of love, obsession, and the passing of an age.
About the Author
Sarah Hall was born in 1974 in Cumbria, England. She received a master of letters in creative writing from Scotland's St. Andrews University and has published four novels. Haweswater won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (overall winner, Best First Novel) and a Society of Authors Betty Trask Award. The Electric Michelangelo was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Eurasia Region), and the Prix Femina Étranger, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Daughters of the North won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. How to Paint a Dead Man was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Portico Prize for Fiction. In 2013 Hall was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, a prize awarded every ten years, and she won the BBC National Short Story Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.