Hunters in the Snow
  • Published: 4 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448139972
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Hunters in the Snow

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EBook
4 Jul 2013
Paperback
15 Jul 2014
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A beguiling first novel about history, truth and falsehood, the ordinary and the very, very strange

After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather’s farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916.

These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too – about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian’s own.

Hunters in the Snow marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer.
  • Published: 4 July 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448139972
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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About the author

Daisy Hildyard

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.

Praise for Hunters in the Snow

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald.

Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of England, with characters who stick like burrs to the imagination.

Helen Dunmore, author of The Siege

A remarkable debut... it's an expansive and ambitious book that has echoes of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Shortlist

Daisy Hilyard's skill has been to weave all the disparate elements into a seamlessly structured and utterly absorbing investigation of our relationship with the past.

Rachel Hore, Independent on Sunday

Ms Hilyard's wit, along with her polish, send a promising signal for the future.

Scotsman

Cleverly deploying all the conventions of non-fiction.

Francesca Angelini, Sunday Times

As Hildyard's story unfolds, the lives of ordinary parents, grandparents and great-grandparents become as pertinent, captivating and touching as any official history of England could be.

Fabric

Makes for interesting reading.

Kathy Stevenson, Daily Mail

An ambitious, almost impossibly wide-ranging book... Where the novel is most original is in tone. If a good writer is someone who matches style to subject, this novel is very prosing indeed.

Andrew Marszal, Daily Telegraph

Hunters in the Snow is a very assured assemblage held together by the questions of narrative, integration, and preservation which run through it.

Words of Mercury

Ambitious debut novel.

Adam Thorpe, Guardian

A remarkably intelligent debut

Lucian Robinson, Observer

Like history itself, the meaning may remain doubtful; but we relish captivating stories.

i

Fine and wonderfully original debut novel.

David Evans, Financial Times

A hauntingly brilliant first novel about how we respond to the past... I envied, as well as admired, this author's literary command. A star is born.

A.N. Wilson, Church Times

One of the year’s most impressive first novels…Hunters in the Snow’s ambition, scope and assurance…are thrilling and admirable, and make for a very fine book indeed.

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