That Summer at Hill Farm

Description

It was the summer that everything changed... A sparkling, witty debut, perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson, Stella Gibbons and Joanna Trollope To the casual outsider, Hill Farm is a rural idyll and the perfect retreat from urban life. Yet beneath the tranquil surface lie discontent, desire and death-watch beetles. Farmer Hayes loves the land - but hates farming. His neglected wife Isabel adores her three children, but is temperamentally unsuited to life as a wife and mother. The Smith sisters have not spoken to one another for forty years, farm-hand Mikey dabbles in pyromania, while neighbour Mr Payne has fled the city, only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England. And after one incendiary summer, all of their lives will be different... Originally published with the title Hill Farm

Miranda France is a writer and translator. The author of two highly acclaimed travel books, Bad Times in Buenos Aires and Don Quixote's Delusions, she has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She has translated Argentine writers including Alberto Manguel, Claudia Pineiro and Liliana Heker. She grew up on a farm not unlike the farm that featured in her first novel, That Summer at Hill Farm, but now lives in London with her husband and two children. The Day Before the Fire is her second novel.

Beautifully rendered, the shifting inner lives of the characters are subtle and believable and the fresh, sometimes subversive observation is a delight -- Elizabeth Buchan * Sunday Times * Miranda France writes skillfully and with a wry touch... That Summer at Hill Farm is a pleasure to read, tempting the reader to wolf it down in one * Sunday Herald * An arresting writer...France's account of village life conveys a genuine, smoldering anger... Adultery, arson and assault - all come bursting out * Guardian * Pyromaniac labourers, feuding pensioners and adulterous housewives blot the landscape in Miranda France's entertaining novel, a sort of homage to Cold Comfort Farm, with a dash of Jilly Cooper and The Archers thrown in -- Adrian Turpin * Financial Times * With an incredible confidence for a debut novelist, Miranda France changes tack from rural romance to murder mystery...[she] writes with such assurance and humour that she carries us along...through the subtle underpinning of her characterization * Spectator *