Peculiar Ground Audiobook (Free)

‘One of the greatest novels of the entire year so far’ THE CHANGING TIMES

A SPECTATOR Reserve OF THE ENTIRE YEAR

‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and large, and funny and sensuous. It’s great’ Tessa Hadley

‘I just enjoyed it so very much’ Philip Pullman

It is the 17th century and a wall structure has been built around a great house. Wychwood can be an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues prepared about Peculiar Surface by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone provides something to cover after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in magic formula gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are flipped away from the gate.

Three centuries later, another wall rises overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. Just a little gal, Nell, observes all.

Nell grows up and Wychwood is invaded. There is a pop festival with the lake, a TV crew in the dining room and an excellent Storm brewing. As the Berlin wall boils down, a fatwa indicators a different ideological faultline and a refugee seeks security in Wychwood.

In the multi-award-winning writer of The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely book about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love as well as the pathos of aging, and about how those that wall others out risk acquiring themselves walled in.