Taking Leave — Roger Hubank

Fleeing from an imprisoning job and a disintegrating marriage, Anthony Hardman seeks refuge in a remote house on the edge of a lonely moor. Here, set free by the liberating expanses of sky and rock, he begins to discover the co-existence of past and present, and the strangeness of remembered experience, in the re-awakening of the bold young climber he once was, finding his fulfillment among the limestone crags and gritstone edges. Darker memories, long suppressed, emerging from his buried self, compel him to re-examine the breakdown of relations with his wife, Elizabeth. Through his friendship with a shepherd and his family, above all with a feral child, he begins to understand what has been lacking in his life. Meanwhile, as he and Elizabeth struggle to come to terms with the unfinished business of their marriage, a catastrophe is looming which will have tragic consequences. Set among the hills and crags of the Peak District, Roger Hubank's novel explores the nature of the “self”, its relationship with the sustaining energies of the earth, and the claims of other lives.