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Towards Mellbreak
Marie-Elsa Bragg
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Description for Towards Mellbreak
Hardback. After many generations, it is now, in 1971, Harold who runs Ard Farm. Out on the fells, he feels his father's presence, and there is hope that he, his grandmother and his Uncle Joe will be able to take the farm forward and prosper. But their way of life is under threat. Farming is undergoing huge change and increasingly harmful intervention. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 225 x 145 x 20. Weight in Grams: 356.
*Shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best First Novel Award* **Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the New Statesman** After many generations, it is now, in 1971, Harold who runs Ard Farm. Out on the fells, he feels his father's presence, and there is hope that he, his grandmother and his Uncle Joe will be able to take the farm forward and prosper. But their way of life is under threat. Farming is undergoing huge change and increasingly harmful intervention. As the years pass, and Harold has a son of his own, he strives to keep control of his land, to make a go of it, even while forces he cannot understand are gradually destroying him... Towards Mellbreak is a hymn both to the landscape of Cumbria and to a disappearing world. Poetic, beautiful and tragic, it gives an account of the struggle to preserve traditions and beliefs in the face of change. It is a quietly bold indictment of the treatment of generations of British men, and an assertion of the power to be found in the rituals we pass down through our families.
Product Details
Publisher
Vintage Publishing
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2017
Condition
New
Weight
356g
Number of Pages
224
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
ISBN
9781784741334
SKU
V9781784741334
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 4 to 8 working days
Ref
99-12
About Marie-Elsa Bragg
Marie-Elsa Bragg is half French, half Cumbrian and was brought up in London. She studied Philosophy and Theology at Oxford University, and trained for the Priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford University. She is a Priest in the diocese of London, an Ignatian spiritual director, a therapist and a Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. Her first novel, Towards Mellbreak, was published in 2017.
Reviews for Towards Mellbreak
A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political
Rowan Williams
This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so the tragedy of what happens is all the more heartbreaking.
Tim Pears How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course... Bragg... not only displays a remarkable gift of observation - of human beings, animals, landscapes - but has written an impassioned elegy for a way of life that has come into head-on collision with the modern world
Max Davidson
Mail on Sunday
A literary force... In so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view
Claire Allfree
Daily Mail
Toward Mellbreak tells the story of struggling Cumbrian fell farmers, with a blunt lyrical richness that is resonant of Ted Hughes
Good Housekeeping
Rowan Williams
This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so the tragedy of what happens is all the more heartbreaking.
Tim Pears How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course... Bragg... not only displays a remarkable gift of observation - of human beings, animals, landscapes - but has written an impassioned elegy for a way of life that has come into head-on collision with the modern world
Max Davidson
Mail on Sunday
A literary force... In so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view
Claire Allfree
Daily Mail
Toward Mellbreak tells the story of struggling Cumbrian fell farmers, with a blunt lyrical richness that is resonant of Ted Hughes
Good Housekeeping