The Sacred Combe

 
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Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2017

‘A man’s eye is accommodative, like his heart.’

‘Beautiful … An intriguing gothic mystery.’ Fanny Blake, Daily Mail

‘A literary hall of mirrors with echoes and ripples running through it.’ The Tablet

‘An atmospheric novel sprinkled with literary and musical allusion.’ Cameron Woodhead, Sydney Morning Herald

‘An exceptional first novel – intelligent, intriguing, wonderfully written, and rich with an atmosphere and sense of place that make it a joy to read.’ James Wilson, author of The Summer of Broken Stories

'An ingenious and atmospheric first novel, inspired by the discovery of a mysterious library lost deep in the English countryside, and vibrating with the literary and musical echoes of late Romanticism, and lots of weather.’ Richard Holmes, author of Coleridge and the Age of Wonder

Samuel Browne’s wife has left him suddenly after three years of marriage. She invites him to ‘go and live a better life without me’. He must start again, and alone. And so it is that Sam finds himself deep in the English countryside in a cold but characterful house, remote and encircled by hills, in the employment and company of an older, wiser man who is as fond of mystery as he is of enlightenment. What is the purpose of the seemingly hopeless task set for Sam in the ancient library? What is the secret of the curtained room? And where does a life lose its way or gain its meaning?

The combe is home to a truth born of fraud, a building made of light, and a family wrecked by recklessness: echoes of loss and love reverberate around the house and around the novel.

Sometimes I hear a fragment of music, a brief sequence of notes, that produces a resonance in some dusty, neglected string stretched between two otherwise remote and disconnected wings of my soul, that catches at me, and lifts me — but that is followed by a dull return to the imperfect, the clumsy, the misunderstood. What if that perfect resonance were sustained for the length of a symphony? What if, in the music of voices and birdsong and the tantalising echoes of other people’s memories, it filled a whole valley?