Stone Book Quartet: From the author of the 2022 Booker Shortlisted Treacle Walker (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - Softcover

Garner, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007204949 ISBN 13: 9780007204946

Publisher: HARPER PERENNIAL, 2010

Synopsis

A classic work of rural magic realism from one of Britain’s greatest children’s novelists.

Through four interconnected fables of a way of living in rural England that has now disappeared, Alan Garner vividly brings to life a landscape situated on the outskirts of industrial Manchester.

Smiths and chandlers, steeplejacks and quarrymen, labourers and artisans all live and work hand in hand with the seasons, the elements, and the land. There is a mutual respect and a knowledge of the magical here that has somehow, somewhere been lost to us. These fables beautifully recapture and restore that lost world in simple, searching prose.

About this title

Review:

‘These books have far more than a story to offer. The final continuity in the stories, linked as they are by repetition of words and image, of places and people, is the continuity of crafts, practised over generations and leaving their products behind them. The prose is simple, concrete and direct, as clear as notes in music and as definite.’ Sunday Times

‘The Stone Book Quartet has an artistry that is nothing short of breathtaking, a simplicity that engages everyone who can hear the voices of the characters on the page. The use of metaphor has a diamond-like quality that makes us read his text as an exciting exploration of writing. He binds the reader to him and shows us the author working with language to make his book as his characters worked with iron and stone. Not a word is wasted. The episodes in each book stand out clear against the sky and landscape of Garner's north-east Cheshire.’ TLS

About the Author:

Alan Garner is one of Britain’s greatest living writers for children, the author of such classics as ELIDOR and THE OWL SERVICE. He has done much to explore the disappearing beliefs and traditions of agricultural England. In 1996 he published an acclaimed and unsettling novel for adults, STRANDLOPER (Harvill).

About this edition

• Publisher: HARPER PERENNIAL
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0007204949
• ISBN 13: 9780007204946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208