Thursbitch
  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Thursbitch

From the author of the 2022 Booker longlisted Treacle Walker

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'Magnificent. A powerful and deeply felt narrative - Thursbitch resonates with liminal, potent songs' Financial Times

A gripping time-slip novel by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-longlisted Treacle Walker
Here John Turner was cast away in a heavy snow storm in the night in or about the year 1755. The print of a woman's shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead.

So reads an enigmatic memorial stone, high on the bank of a prehistoric Pennine track in Cheshire, a mystery that lives on in the surrounding hill farms.

John Turner was a packman. With his train of horses he carried salt and silk, travelling distances incomprehensible to his community. John brought ideas as well as gifts, from market town to market town, from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road.

In the twenty-first century, two hundred and fifty years after John's life, Ian and Sal's world resounds with the echo John's death. Walking on the moor one day they slip between time and are lost somewhere between Jack's vanished world and their own. This poetic, fantastical novel is is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.

'Eerie and immaculately written' Olivia Laing, Observer
  • Published: 15 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Alan Garner

Alan Garner was born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934. His began writing his first novel at the age of 22 and is renowned as one of Britain's outstanding writers for young adults. He has won many prizes for his writing, and, in 2001 he was awarded the OBE for services to literature.

Also by Alan Garner

Grey Wolf, Prince Jack and the Firebird: A Magic Beans Story
Magic Beans: A Handful of Fairytales from the Storybag
See all

Praise for Thursbitch

Eerie and immaculately written

Olivia Laing, Observer

A rare flight of the imagination - and an unforgettable book

Metro

The land does indeed seem alive thanks to Garner's acute sense of place and his delight in language...This novel crackles with linguistic life

Sunday Times

Garner's book is only a slim volume, yet in the ideas and possibilities it suggests, it punches well above its weight

Sunday Herald

The experience of reading Thursbitch is so overwhelming that, after closing the book, it remains more real than anything around one... His art reaches out from the society of ancestors... with trepidation undoubtedly but also with a transforming, youthful hope

Independent

There is more meaning and worth in a single paragraph of Alan Garner than in much of the pale, thin stuff that passes for contemporary English fiction

Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman

Eerie and immaculately written

Olivia Laing, Observer

A rare flight of the imagination - and an unforgettable book

Metro

The land does indeed seem alive thanks to Garner's acute sense of place and his delight in language...This novel crackles with linguistic life

Sunday Times

Garner's book is only a slim volume, yet in the ideas and possibilities it suggests, it punches well above its weight

Sunday Herald

The experience of reading Thursbitch is so overwhelming that, after closing the book, it remains more real than anything around one... His art reaches out from the society of ancestors... with trepidation undoubtedly but also with a transforming, youthful hope

Independent

There is more meaning and worth in a single paragraph of Alan Garner than in much of the pale, thin stuff that passes for contemporary English fiction

Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman
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