Devil’s Highway

Three journeys. Three thousand years. One destination. The Devil’s Highway is a thrilling, epic and timely tale of love, loss, fanaticism, heroism and sacrifice. ‘Brilliant … a powerful meditation on the damages – and the good – we have wrought, and will wreak, on the living world’ Robert Macfarlane, Book of the Year His fingers fastened about Her stone. He brought it to the light and held it to his nose. There was lightning locked inside. He rolled the stone in his palm to give it the heat of his body. She had come to him, catching his eye where she lay among dull flints. She alone among the stones had spoken. An ancient British boy, discovering a terrorist plot, must choose between his brother and his tribe. In the twenty-first century, two men – one damaged by war, another by divorce – clash over their differing claims on the land, and a young girl is caught between them. In the distant future, a gang of feral children struggles to reach safety in a burning world. A Roman road, an Iron Age hill fort, a hand-carved flint, and a cycle of violence that must be broken. As gripping as it is dazzling, The Devil’s Highway is a bold and intimate novel that spans centuries and challenges our dearest assumptions about what it means to be civilised.

‘Brilliant. The best treatment of climate change in fiction I've come across. A powerful, essential novel’ George Monbiot ‘In satisfyingly Alan Garneresque fashion, the cycle of stories – historical, contemporary and science fictional – implies a single underlying narrative of landscape; human behaviour echoes from time frame to time frame, through the same cautious liaisons and breakages of trust, the same muddles of love and prejudice, the same sense of family as central to survival’ Guardian ‘A fierce, immersive vision of a novel. Wise, humane but never sentimental, The Devil's Highway is a story of love, rebellion, trauma and survival. It is the story of our relationship with the natural world – of how we got here, and where we might go next. No story could be more important’ Tom Bullough, author of Addlands ‘The Devils Highway is profound and powerful, its prose moving to poetry. Gregory Norminton writes in language scraped down to its bleached bones – but how exquisitely he makes those bones sing’ TLS ‘Norminton cleverly shows how the places generations pass through have a way of preserving their ghosts’ Sunday Times ‘This is a work of staggering imagination, of unflinching acuity, powerful, poetic and profound. Telling the story of climate breakdown through language breakdown, it magnifies the meaning of loss, portraying a devastated culture without history or literature, whose language is down to its bleached bones and yet – how those bones sing’ Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey ‘A striking and dazzlingly poetic meditation on the resonance of place, conflict and kinship. . . . Norminton's skilfully-wrought novel is a memorable and thought-provoking read’Liz Jensen, author of The Rapture ‘A big, ambitious, beautifully written book that examines, with immense sympathy and generosity, one of the greatest of all themes, place, and our complex, fraught relationship with it’ Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others

Gregory Norminton is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories and a book of aphorism. He teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. www.gregorynorminton.co.uk