The Wake

Description

‘As disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting’ Eimear McBride, New Statesman’A literary triumph’ Adam Thorpe, Guardian1066. The Norman invasion has brutally seized the country that the Buccmaster of Holland, a proud landowning farmer in Lincolnshire, once knew. Bereft of his wife and sons, the Buccmaster clings to the ways of the Old Gods, and assembles a band of ‘grene men’ to seek revenge. Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2014 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Wake transports readers to an English landscape steeped in folklore, omens and violence. Told in a ‘shadow tongue’ – a form of Old English understandable to a modern reader – the novel is an astonishing and gripping depiction of faith, homeland and identity at the end of the world. ‘Strange and extraordinary . . . it lingers in the imagination’ The Times