Thursbitch — Alan Garner

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