Addlands

Addlands is the moving and engrossing story of the Hamer family and their home, the Funnon Farm, deep in the hills of the Welsh borders.There is Idris, proud and insular, a man of the plough and the prayer sheet, haunted by the First World War. Then there is the boy Oliver, who grows to be a near mythic giant in the community, a fighter, a drinker, inescapably rooted in their hard, remote valley. And there is Etty, Oliver's mother, the centre of this close constellation, who navigates old ways and new technologies as she struggles to ensure her family's survival. From the ancient silence in the hills to the encroaching roar of modernity, spanning seventy years, Addlands tells of human and animal; it speaks of the land and lets the land speak for itself. It is as vast and complex as a symphony but as pure and moving as a solo voice in an empty church.

A truly ambitious mixture of social realism, folklore, Romanticism and imagistic paean to nature. To say it's Poldark meets Dylan Thomas is to undersell Bullough's clout as a serious writer, but in truth you could approach it either as a made-for-TV nourish romp or a cutting-edge work of art, and love it either way, The [characters] are realised so fully, and with such vitality, that there seems no doubt about the blood running through their veins... Bullough has a flair for alchemical descriptions, thrillingly repurposing adjectives and verbs... He also clearly savours the tang of his characters' tongues [with] occasional, gloriously unexpected sunbursts of humour, Tom Bullough's story of one family's struggle in a world of continuity and change is beautifully imagined and exquisitely told - passionate, lyrical, profound, sad, and sometimes, too, when you least expect it, very funny, Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough's writing is a joy - disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché, Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful novel, a haunting fusion of person, place and history

TOM BULLOUGH lives in the Brecon Beacons. Addlands is his fourth novel.