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

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

About the Author
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.

Reviews
Eerie and immaculately written * 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780099459361
Author Alan Garner
Format Paperback
Page Count 176
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 120g
Dimensions(mm) 194mm * 128mm * 18mm