Book description
It is 1936 in a remote dale in the old, northern county of
Westmorland. For centuries the rural community has remained the same
and the Lightburn family have been immersed in the harsh
hill-farming tradition - unchanged by the advent of modernity. Then
a man from the city of Manchester arrives, spokesman for a vast
industrial project which will devastate both the landscape and the
local community. Mardale will be flooded to create a new reservoir,
supplying water to the Midland cities. In the coming year this
corner of Lakeland will be evacuated and transformed.
Jack Liggett, the Waterworks' representative, further compounds
the problems faced by the village as he begins a troubled affair
with Janet Lightburn. A woman of force and strength of mind, her
natural orthodoxy deeply influences him. Finally, in tragic
circumstances, a remarkable, desperate act on Janet's part attempts
to restore the valley to its former state.
Told in luminous prose with an intuitive sense for period and
place, Haweswater remembers a rural England that has been
disappearing for decades. It is a novel about love, obsession and
the destruction of a community, told with grace and artistry by a
young storyteller of great imaginative and emotional power.
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She received a BA from
Aberystwyth University, Wales, and a MLitt in Creative Writing from St
Andrews, Scotland. She is the author of Haweswater, which won the 2003
Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel, a Society of Authors
Betty Trask Award, and a Lakeland Book of the Year prize. In 2004, her
second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, was short-listed for the Man
Booker prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia region), and the
Prix Femina Etranger, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize for
Fiction. Her third novel, The Carhullan Army, was published in 2007, and
won the 2006/07 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tiptree Jr. Award,
a Lakeland Book of the Year prize, and was short-listed for the Arthur
C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Her fourth novel, How to Paint a
Dead Man, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
