It is 1864, St Pancras is a sprawling cemetery-slum, housing London s teeming dead, dying and decrepit in their thousands. With the advent of the Great Midland railway line running from Manchester to London s newest station, 10,000 bodies must be disinterred and, by order of the church, reburied on consecrated soil. Charged with the exhumation are The Resurrection Men, a gang of thugs for whom the dead are no more sacred than the ground they break, and at their head, the young Thomas Hardy - architectural apprentice and callow idealist. We follow the fledgling writer as he struggles to reconcile the job at hand, the brute reality of the rotting dead, the rapid onset of modernity and his own wavering belief. As the corpses mount in rising piles, Hardy endeavours to retain these lost identities - cataloguing and collecting stones and ephemera from the opened graves. But as the bodies moulder and disintegrate, so too Hardy begins to lose his sense of self. Now, 130 years later - as the Eurostar approaches its terminus - an oddly similar drama is playing out: One with its roots in the past, but its head nowhere in particular.
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.20
Trade in The Hardy Tree - A Story About Gang Mentality for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.20, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Learn more
|
Book Description
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
'The Hardy Tree, to be savoured; this is the stuff, beautiful and mysterious. A cracking, crackling totentanz.' --Heathcote Williams
'Puts the psycho back into psychogeography but jettisons deep topology for a far more impressive literary archaeology. Think Suicide Bridge era lain Sinclair but with a gallows humour and voodoo swagger. At last, some truly far out fiction for the post-dubstep generation!' --Stewart Home
'One of London's most potent secrets.' --Iain Sinclair
'Puts the psycho back into psychogeography but jettisons deep topology for a far more impressive literary archaeology. Think Suicide Bridge era lain Sinclair but with a gallows humour and voodoo swagger. At last, some truly far out fiction for the post-dubstep generation!' --Stewart Home
'One of London's most potent secrets.' --Iain Sinclair
'Puts the psycho back into psychogeography but jettisons deep topology for a far more impressive literary archaeology. Think Suicide Bridge era lain Sinclair but with a gallows humour and voodoo swagger. At last, some truly far out fiction for the post-dubstep generation!' --Stewart Home
'One of London's most potent secrets.' --Iain Sinclair
'Puts the psycho back into psychogeography but jettisons deep topology for a far more impressive literary archaeology. Think Suicide Bridge era lain Sinclair but with a gallows humour and voodoo swagger. At last, some truly far out fiction for the post-dubstep generation!' --Stewart Home
'One of London's most potent secrets.' --Iain Sinclair
About the Author
Following her years as a teen tearaway, lphgenia Baal began her 20s as a journalist, writing about music and the arts. This ended badly, in an extended melodrama involving fisticuffs and the police that ran across two continents. Now a full-time author, she has contributed writing to Litro and Smoke: A London Peculiar , self-published a zine of shorts, The Gentle Art of Tramping and read at the Royal Academy, Port Eliot Literary Festival and the Book Club Boutique. The Hardy Tree is her first novel.
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By guy kennaway
Format:Hardcover
This intriguing production is not quite a book- it's more like a collection of research that a writer accumulates just before she starts to write the finished article. There are faux historical documents, biographic snippets, snatches of narrative, brief descriptive paragraphs and swirling disconnected pieces of dialogue. It is like listening to the thoughts of people reading in a research library. The story- such as it is - unfolds out of chronology and in a range of different and sometimes inexplicable voices. Some of Baal's pastiches are unerringly accurate, and some seem anachronistic and waffly. It is a high stakes game to dispense with conventional narrative, but clearly Baal is a writer with guts. She plays at a table with Becket, Joyce, Sterne and Virgina Woolf, so she had better be good or they'll soon bust her. I can't tell if in her next work Baal will go towards conventional narrative or further away from it, which would surely mean leaving the book behind and embracing some kind of performance or sculpture. Whatever she does, I predict it will be interesting.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
