Land of the Living

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Land of the Living by Georgina Harding, read by Antonia Beamish.

A SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense ... A masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love' Guardian

Charlie’s experiences at the Battle of Kohima and the months he spent lost in the remote jungles of Nagaland during the Second World War are now history. Home and settled on a farm in Norfolk and newly married to Claire, he is one of the lucky survivors. Starting a family and working the land seem the best things a man can be doing.

But a chasm exists between them. Memories flood Charlie’s mind; at night, on rain-slicked roads and misty mornings in the fields, the past can feel more real than the present. Though hidden even to himself, the darkest secrets of Charlie’s adventures in the strange and shadowy ridges of the Nagaland mountains, his dream-like encounters with the mysterious and ancient tribesmen, leak and bleed through his consciousness. What should be said and what left unsaid? Is it possible to forge a new life in the wake of unfathomable horror?

A compelling addition to Harding’s cycle of acclaimed novels on themes of witness, memory and silence, Land of the Living questions the very nature of survival, and what it is that the living owe the dead.

Critics Review

Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense, Land of the Living is a masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love
Guardian
Georgina Harding’s beautiful novels tell of wars, and troubled homecomings as traumatised fighting men try to re-enter interrupted marriages and homes grown strange ... Land of the Living is as wise and haunting as its predecessors
New Statesman, Books of the Year
Georgina Harding’s beautiful novels tell of wars, and troubled homecomings as traumatised fighting men try to re-enter interrupted marriages and homes grown strange … Her Land of the Living is as wise and haunting as its predecessors
New Statesman, Books of the Year
A quietly powerful novel
Observer
Audacious and moving … Elegiac, often elliptical vignettes that immaculately simulate Charlie’s shame, regret and grief … Masterly
Sunday Times
Remarkable and rare
Daily Mail
Elegant and precise, Georgina Harding wonderfully describes Charlie’s sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating complex feelings to those who haven’t experienced war
Sunday Express
Tremendously imaginative, really compassionate … Manages to make them almost tangibly real, really immersive
BBC Radio 4 ‘Open Book’
A lyrical novel about war and memory
Guardian, Ones to Watch 2018
In sombre, elegant prose, Harding wonderfully describes Charlie’s sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating his complex feelings and fears to those closest to him
Mail on Sunday, The Best New Fiction
Revelatory in many ways, shining a light on the darker aspects of war … Quiet power and unexpected grace … Adds to Harding’s reputation as an incisive chronicler of war and its aftermath
Financial Times
Written with an admirable precision, and the dark of the narrative has to be teased out … It is a novel of ideas, for it invites you to think of questions of responsibility, exploitation, cruelty, brutality ... One of those rare novels which has you thinking, when you reach the end, that there is much you have passed over which demands a second reading to be fully felt and understood
Scotsman
Over several restrained, poetic novels, Georgina Harding has carved out a space for herself as one of the most incisive explorers of physical adversity and its psychological effects … Harding’s graceful style and self-control illuminate the crushing weight of history on the individual, and how different strategies for survival can cause a lifetime of pain and regret … Land of the Living is a poised and carefully crafted novel of powerful, submerged emotions, taking an under-explored aspect of Britain’s war and finding in it something graceful and strange, mythic as well
Herald
Disquieting
Times Literary Supplement
Perfect – a flawless gem of a novel from start to finish … Wonderful, strange and wise
Patrick McGrath

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