Fiction

FABULOUS

‘Brilliant fantasies that blend the power of the ancient myths with the immediacy of real life.’ John Carey

‘A wonderful book, bringing together superb narrative gifts and a subtle understanding of the way myth works. The story of Joseph moved me to tears.’ John Burnside

Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.

They’re ordinary people. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore.

The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

Once you have entered the world of Fabulous you are unlikely to leave until you are done… Throughout there is a magnetic quality to the writing… a mesmerising beauty. Hughes-Hallett uses myth to get at the simmering violence underneath the dowdy trappings of little England’ Barbara Graziosi - Times Literary Supplement

‘Clever, unusual and highly original. This is a strange and brilliant collection – if you knew nothing about fable or myth before, your appetite will be well and truly whet.’ Martha Alexander - Independent

‘In Hughes-Hallett’s reimaginings of old stories, the modern world plays host to ancient dramas. In Orpheus, a hospital ward is the setting for the eternal mystery of loss and death, ; while in the delicious Tristan, a delirious love-triangle is fuelled by a love potion of illicit drugs’ Eithne Farry - Daily Mail

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett updates ancient tales – from Greek myths to Bible stories to folklore – for modern times. Hughes-Hallett’s tales are familiar yet strange, its modern characters wittily observed, the narrative charged with emotion. These eight incantatory tales, like the fables they’re based on, enthral.’ Francesca Carington - Tatler

‘A heartwrenching version of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the couple are reimagined as an elderly pair, Orpheus slipping into dementia. It is wonderful.’ The Bookseller

‘Fabulous is an exhilarating collection of ancient stories retold and refigured for modern times. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s publishers compare her to Angela Carter, but she is more compassionate and more subtle.’ Lindsay Duguid - The Tablet 

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a wonderfully versatile writer and her enthralling modern reworkings of ancient myths are playful and moving, sharply observed and hauntingly mysterious. Fabulous indeed’ Fiona McCarthy

‘Fabulous is enchanting. The sort of book you can't stop reading, even though you never want it to end’ Sue Prideaux

‘The writing in Fabulous is fabulous. So is the imagination, the wit and the storytelling. This is a marvellous book.’ Carmen Callil

PECULIAR GROUND

Shortlisted for The Ondaatje Prize      

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize

From the multi-award-winning author of the The Pike comes a breathtakingly ambitious, beautiful and timely novel about game keepers and witches, agitators and aristocrats, about young love and the pathos of aging, and about how those who wall others out risk finding themselves walled in.

It is the 17th century and a wall is being built around a great house. Wychwood is an enclosed world, its ornamental lakes and majestic avenues planned by Mr Norris, landscape-maker. A world where everyone has something to hide after decades of civil war, where dissidents shelter in the forest, lovers linger in secret gardens, and migrants, fleeing the plague, are turned away from the gate.

Three centuries later, another wall goes up overnight, dividing Berlin, while at Wychwood, over one hot, languorous weekend, erotic entanglements are shadowed by news of historic change. A little girl, Nell, observes all.

‘Unlike anything I’ve read. Haunting and huge, and funny and sensuous. It’s wonderful’
Tessa Hadley

'Peculiar Ground  is so clever and beautifully written it gripped me from start to end.  I abandoned family and work to finish it.'        Roddy Doyle

'Lucy Hughes-Hallett's novel is immensely vivid, full of rich and deeply imagined life, and glowing with energy. Her Wychwood estate is utterly real, her characters (both seventeenth- and twentieth-century) entirely convincing, and the story moves with a masterful assurance. There’s a calm virtuosity in the language that I admired a great deal.  I just enjoyed it so very much.'                Philip Pullman

'An extraordinarily accomplished first novel... rich, dense, capacious and complicated... and absolutely involving, thanks to beautiful description and a very fine understanding of human emotion. There is something almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance...Peculiar Ground  is marvellously subtle: like its images, its preoccupations are allowed to develop in a way that feels both organic and magical. Its central image, of a society enclosed by a wall that is as dangerous as it is protective, could not be more pertinent to our world of hardening borders, and yet it resists easy interpretation...  Humane, thoughtful, compelling and packed with magic, this is a remarkable achievement.' Christobel Kent - The Guardian

'Peculiar Ground is a rich layering of history and fiction....  erudite, elegant but easy-going.  This memorable story of place and transience is one of the best novels of the year.' Melissa Katsoulis - The Times

‘A powerful and resonant piece of work.’ Joseph O'Connor - Irish Times

'A teeming, heaving whirligig of a novel that opens in Restoration England just after the Civil War, before accelerating forward.  Ideas of control and power, refuge and rebellion, run through this story like minerals through rock, with a key section set in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down... Hughes-Hallett retains terrific control of her subject matter in a novel beautifully alert to the repeating patterns of personal and political history.' Clare Allfree - Daily Mail   

'In its carefully framed structure and in the elegance of her prose the book soon reveals itself as a subtle and powerful achievement, making profound thematic links between the turbulent politics of the mid-17th century and the surprisingly fluid ideologies of the Cold War period, as well as with our increasingly illiberal age.'   Richard Strachan - Herald Scotland 

'A richly imagined, impressively detailed exploration of people in a landscape and the changes that history and the passing of time impose upon them....admirably ambitious and well-written.  Nick Rennison - Sunday Times    

'Hughes-Hallett has already enjoyed critical acclaim as a biographer..It seems extraordinary that she should have taken so long to come to fiction, when she writes so instinctively with a novelist’s imagination.'  Stephanie Merrit - The Observer 

'Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s ambitious first novel dances between past and present, history and modernity. The landscape of this novel – its grounds and waters and walls – is magically and movingly evoked, and remains in the imagination long after the reader passes beyond its gates.' Erica Wagner - New Statesman  

'This happy, tragic, ever expanding and literally groundbreaking story .' Andrew Barrow - Spectator

'Feted biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett deftly loops together the accounts of the sprawling cast of utterly believable characters to create a sensual meditation on the nature of Paradise.' Gwendolyn Smith - Mail on Sunday

'Lucy Hughes-Hallett won the Costa Biography Award for her insightful, intriguing portrait of Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio in The Pike.  It was chock-full of colourful characters and startling incidents and this clever, compelling novel is similarly rich.  This brilliant novel explores notions of ownership and inheritance, freedom and imprisonment as it twists and turns through the ages.'  Eithne Farry - Sunday Express

'Elegant, inventive, mystical' Ben Lawrence - Sunday Telegraph

'This elegant, witty novel of ideas' Ruth Scurr - Times Literary Supplement

'A wide-reaching, ambitious epic of a book...  Hughes-Hallett writes with great intelligence... and she's a cracking story-teller too'  Jaine Blackman - Oxford Times

'Hughes-Hallett, an accomplished biographer, has orchestrated that rare thing: a fresh classic. Ambitious, satisfying and mature, Peculiar Ground is spell-binding.' Caroline Jackson - Country Life

‘A dazzling historical novel with timely resonances for the Trumpian present…The prose is uniformly gorgeous. … Treated to such a brilliant, ambitious mixture of actual history and creative invention, the determined reader  will turn the last page rewarded, delighted, and eager for Hughes-Hallett’s next.’ Boston Globe

'Large and rich... full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail...a grand spectacle' John Vernon - New York Times

‘Clever, many-layered...  sophisticated and erudite...   Ms. Hughes-Hallett is a natural heir to A.S. Byatt, delivering a densely patterned novel that shimmers with human interest as it probes our cultural story.’ Elizabeth Lowry - Wall Street Journal

'This wonderful book... Hughes-Hallett is a master story-teller. Her prose is a treasure - evocative, rich, engaging' Library Journal - starred review

‘Who owns the land, who has right of way, what the very wealthy owe everyone else: these are questions that never go away. .. The novel is a pleasure to read for the loveliness of its language. It's also a timely meditation on walls, on what they keep in and what they keep out. A first novel stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose.’ Kirkus - starred review and ‘Best Fiction’ choice