The Voice that Thunders

(Paperback)

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A collection of writings by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-longlisted Treacle Walker
Alan Garner is an exceptional lecturer and essayist. This rich collection of writings, spanning more than twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.

The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.

This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

Reviews

'His work has a symphonic quality unique in fiction' The Times

Author Bio

Alan Garner was born and still lives in Cheshire, an area which has had a profound effect on his writing and provided the seed of many ideas worked out in his books. His fourth book, The Owl Service' brought Alan Garner to everyone's attention. It won two important literary prizes The Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal and was made into a serial by Granada Television. It has established itself as a classic and Alan Garner as a writer of great distinction.