Peculiar Ground, Lucy HughesHallett
Peculiar Ground, Lucy HughesHallett
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Peculiar Ground
A Novel

Author: Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Narrator: Juanita McMahon, Leighton Pugh, Adjoa Andoh, Peter Noble, Jake Curran, Rachel Atkins, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Anna Bentinck, Maggie Ollershaw

Unabridged: 17 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 01/09/2018


Synopsis

“Sophisticated and erudite. . . . Hughes-Hallett is a natural heir to A.S. Byatt, delivering a densely patterned novel that shimmers with human interest as it probes our cultural story.”—Wall Street JournalThe Costa Award-winning author of The Pike makes her literary fiction debut with an extraordinary historical novel in the spirit of Wolf Hall and Atonement—a great English country house novel, spanning three centuries, that explores surprisingly timely themes of immigration and exclusion.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, while at Wychwood, an erotic entanglement over one sticky, 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 great house is invaded: a pop festival by the lake, a television crew in the dining room, a Great Storm brewing. In 1989, as the Cold War peters out, 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 game keepers 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.

About Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year and the Costa Biography Award and was chosen by The Sunday Times as the biography of the decade. Her novel Peculiar Ground was shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Her other books include Fabulous, a collection of short stories, and the cultural histories Cleopatra and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen.She is a widely respected critic and was chair of the judges of the 2021 International Booker Prize.


Reviews

Lord Woldingham's fancy to enclose his park in a great ring of stone. Other potentates are content to impose their will on nature only in the immediate purlieus of their palace. They make gardens where they may saunter, enjoying the air without fouling their shoes. But once one steps outside the......more

Goodreads review by Jules

Peculiar Ground is a wonderfully descriptive and enchanting story. I loved the way it was written and felt it flowed well. I also loved the map at the beginning, and within minutes of reading this, I was there within the beautiful place of Wychwood and didn’t want to leave. I found I became emotiona......more

Goodreads review by Claire

In 1663 the owners of Wychwood, an English country house and estate have a garden designed and build a wall to contain it. In 1961 the current owners and their friends watch in disbelief as the wall is built across Berlin. In 1973 Wychwood's wall is breached by a group marking a public right of way.......more