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    Peculiar Ground: A Novel
    Peculiar Ground: A Novel
    Peculiar Ground: A Novel
    Audiobook17 hours

    Peculiar Ground: A Novel

    Written by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

    Narrated by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Juanita McMahon, Leighton Pugh and

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    About this audiobook

    ""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. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful.""—Tessa Hadley

    The 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJan 9, 2018
    ISBN9780062798428
    Author

    Lucy Hughes-Hallett

    Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.

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    • 5/5
      This is a wonderfully quirky and clever novel. The main character is the house and grounds of Wychwood in Oxfordshire and the central theme is walls. The story begins in 1663 when a wall is built around the house to keep those inside 'safe'. The tale then leaps forward in time to 1961 when the Berlin Wall suddenly appears almost over night, and then time hops again to 1973 and again to 1989 when big changes are occurring in the world and walls are broached.There are a lot of allegories and parallels in this enchanting, shall we call it, parable. Walls can keep us safe or divide us, even isolate us to a certain extent. We can also build a wall around ourselves. I think it is quite relevant to the present time, too. It has a lot to tell us. There are usually chinks in walls and we should bear in mind there is a whole wide world out there waiting to be explored and bridges to be built!It is beautifully and vividly written. Some of it is told almost like a fable. The grounds of Wychwood are so easy to imagine. It has a magical and otherworldly feel, a peculiar ground indeed. What a fabulous place to live or visit! I love the map at the front of the book. It really helps with visualising where everything is. There are some brilliant characters and, as in a lot of country estates, the families seem to stay through the generations, the same name recurring. I found this story so captivating. I absolutely loved it! I was very sorry to turn the last page. Wychwood and its peculiar ground is well worth a visit!Many thanks to Lovereading.co.uk for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.

      2 people found this helpful