Hunters in the Snow

Description

A beguiling first novel about history, truth and falsehood, the ordinary and the very, very strange After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather's farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916. These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too - about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian's own. Hunters in the Snow marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer.

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. This is her first novel.

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald. -- Kevin Powers * author of The Yellow Birds * A remarkably intelligent debut -- Lucian Robinson * Observer * It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of England, with characters who stick like burrs to the imagination. -- Helen Dunmore * author of The Siege * A remarkable debut... it's an expansive and ambitious book that has echoes of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. * Shortlist * Daisy Hilyard's skill has been to weave all the disparate elements into a seamlessly structured and utterly absorbing investigation of our relationship with the past. -- Rachel Hore * Independent on Sunday *