1066, told from the losing side — in a language of its own. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Gordon Burn Prize. A John Murray Classics edition with a new foreword by Mark Rylance.
Buccmaster of Holland is a free farmer of the Lincolnshire fens — proud, stubborn, steeped in the old gods his grandfather taught him. Then the comet comes, and after it the French. His sons march to Hastings; the invaders come to his village; and everything he has is burned away. What's left of him takes to the wild fens with a band of broken men, waging a doomed guerrilla war against the new masters of England — and against something darker rising in himself.
Kingsnorth wrote the novel in what he calls a “shadow tongue”: an invented English built from Old English bones, strange for half a page and then hypnotic, until you're hearing a destroyed world speak in its own voice. There is nothing else like it — a post-apocalyptic novel set a thousand years ago.
This edition
- John Murray Classics series livery
- New foreword by Mark Rylance
Honours
- Longlisted for the Booker Prize
- Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize
Perfect for readers of
Beowulf, Cormac McCarthy, Max Porter's Lanny — and anyone who wants fiction that takes a genuine risk.
About the author
Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist. The Wake is the first of his Buccmaster trilogy, followed by Beast and Alexandria.
