Description
'Edward Parnell has created a composite work that blends autobiography, family chronicle, travel journal, a birdwatcher's life list, a photo album and an introduction to some masters of the British ghost story. This may seem an improbable combination, except to readers of W.G. Sebald, the writer who obviously inspired Parnell. Sebald's books, especially The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz , are similar genre-slippery explorations of spiritual desolation.' Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Edward Parnell is the author of the narrative non-fiction 'Ghostland' (Harper Collins), shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 Award for memoir. He lives in an medieval market town in the east of England and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He has been the recipient of an Escalator Award from the National Centre for Writing and a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. 'The Listeners' (2014) was his first novel, and was the winner of the Rethink New Novels Prize.
Features & Highlights
- SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020
- ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare
- ‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of
- Crow Country
- In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death.
- In
- Ghostland
- , Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. R. James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper; from W. G. Sebald’s
- The Rings of Saturn
- and Graham Swift’s
- Waterland
- to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film
- The Wicker Man
- …
- Ghostland
- is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature.
