Josh Lawton - Hardcover

Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster. His novels include The Hired Man, for which he won the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, Without a City Wall, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The Soldier's Return, winner of the WHSmith Literary Award, A Son of War and Crossing the Lines, both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Place in England, which was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, and most recently Grace and Mary. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria.

Set among the bare crags of England's Cumbria, an area peopled by farmers without ambition or prospect, this tragic novel foretells doom from the beginning. Innocent Josh Lawton meets Maureen Telfordan exotic young woman from a tougher, livelier townat a dance, and falls instantly in love, ignoring the gossip about her and her family's violence and depravity. When Maureen becomes pregnant they marry and rent a cottage, where Josh tends their daughter, and is content. But Maureen grows increasingly restless, eventually succumbing to her passion for an old beau, an act that precipitates tragedy. The novel's strength lies in the protagonists' Hardyesque struggle to triumph over ordained disaster. Elegantly written by an author ( The Maid of Buttermere) steeped in his landscape and the mores of his characters, this subtly powerful novel should add to Bragg's rising reputation here.
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