Cryers Hill

(Paperback)

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Description

A story of love, loss, and space. In July 1934, Walter Brown went alone to the woodland pond. He saw his girl swimming there. He watched her floating and saw how white her skin was in the green water, her belly, her breasts, her pond-tangled hair. Then she turned over like an otter and dived down. She did not come up again. In July 1969, Sean Matthews finds himself in the very same woodland, where he witnesses an event he later cannot bear to remember. Two boys, growing up in the same village thirty-five years apart, have each seen something they shouldn't. Hailed by Salman Rushie on the publication of her first novel, Pop, Cryers Hill confirms Kitty Aldridge as a writer of immense talent, possessing the rare gift of enabling us to see the world anew.

Reviews

A beautifully written, profoundly moving, observantly funny, deeply English novel by one of the most talented prose writers I have read in years -- Carol Ann Duffy * Daily Telegraph *
Mercurial, deft and wondrous in its sentences and uncanny descriptions...A considerable achievement by a daring writer who's come fully into her own -- Richard Ford
Kitty Aldridge's language captures the casual brutality of childhood like a butterfly in a net * Independent *
[An] excellent pastoral novel -- Laura Macauley * Time Out *
Aldridge herself loads the novel with verbal twists and turns that leave its texture as ridged, layered and undulating as the Chilterns themselves -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent *

Author Bio

Kitty Aldridge was born in the Middle East but grew up in England. A graduate of the Drama Centre, London, she has since worked in theatre, film, and television as an actress and writer. Her first novel, Pop (Cape, 2001), was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002 and shortlisted for the Pendleton May First Novel Award 2002. Her most recent novels are Cryers Hill and A Trick I Learned from Dead Men. Her short story, Arrivederci Les, won the Bridport Short Story Prize 2011 (Bridport Prize Anthology 2011).