Strandloper: From the author of the 2022 Booker longlisted Treacle Walker

Description

Based on a true story, Strandloper tells the extraordinary tale of a nineteenth-century Englishman who, having been sentenced and transported to Australia, escaped to live among the Aborigines for thirty years. I sing the eagle. "Bone of the Cloud. The Clashing Rock. The Hard Darkness." It hangs above the grave mound. I sing, dreaming... William Buckley was transported to Australia in 1801. He escaped and lived as an Aborigine for thirty-one years. In this visionary novel, Alan Garner is true to William the Cheshire bricklayer and William the Aboriginal spiritual leader, as William is true to his fate. The result is extraordinary.

Alan Garner was born in Congleton, Cheshire, in 1934 and grew up in Alderly Edge, where his father's family had lived for more than three hundred years. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Magdelen College, Oxford, after which he began writing his first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, at the age of twenty-two. He is renowned as one of Britain's outstanding writers for young adults and has won many prizes for his writing. In 2001 he was awarded the OBE for services to literature.

A work of terrible beauty * Observer * A remarkable feat of literary imagination * Sunday Times * Strandloper's vision is cosmic and as elusive as a rainbow... The ending gathers the words into a powerful cry for wisdom that recognises the ineffable * Sydney Morning Herald * A novel as uncompromising and bright as anything this talented author has ever produced * Daily Telegraph * I know of little in recent fiction more moving than the final section of this novel... Garner's ambitious subject is matched by an astounding mastery of technique * New Statesman *