9781784630935

15/04/17

PB

400 pages

Shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2018

Shortlisted for the 2017 Costa First Novel Award

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018

Longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2018  

New Faces of Fiction 2017, Observer

Observer Fiction to look out for in 2017

The Irish Times What To Look Out for in 2017 from Independent Publishers

Jen Campbell’s ‘Most Anticipated Books of 2017’

Jean Bookish Thoughts ‘Most Anticipated Releases of 2017’

A dark social-realist fairytale, spotlighting the shadowy underside of 1920s England

Summer 1923: the modern world. Orphaned Lucy Marsh climbs into the back of an old army truck and is whisked off to the woods north of London – a land haunted by the past, where lost souls and monsters conceal themselves in the trees.

In a sunlit clearing she meets the ‘funny men’, a quartet of disfigured ex-soldiers named after Dorothy’s companions in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here are the loved and the damaged, dark forests and darker histories, and the ever-present risk of discovery and violent retribution. Xan Brooks’ stunning debut is heartbreaking, disturbing and redemptive.

‘Philly Malicka enjoys a strange fable about drugs. jazz and the scars of the Great War ... The year is 1923 and the trauma of the First World War has left Britain misshapen. Part of society hopes for social change, while others, ossified, look backward. This dark, magical tale explores the chasm between the two, and how a nation ravaged by “the storms of the things they once did, the people they once were” seeks redemption.’ —Philly Malicka, The Telegraph

‘The Pink Earl’s stately home, where the clocks all tell different times, may be a relic from a vanished past, but the future is massively present there – and it’s the one we recognise, in which everyone is “embarked on their own adventure” and in which the rhetoric of constant change at one level disguises the perpetuation of entrenched power at another.’ —M. John Harrison, The Guardian