"The Girl on the Hill is highly original and quite unlike anything I have read before, and that in itself is very refreshing."
"...this is truly great writing."
Hardy & Knox Literary Consultants
www.hardyandknox.com
Preface
There is something in the forest, something ancient and dark, waiting; something that can call the living and raise the departed, granting and taking life.
A dying teenage girl is abducted and brought to the forest by an old countrywoman, who draws on its power to heal her. Freed from disease, the girl begins a new life hidden within the trees, feral, uninhibited and independent.
But freedom comes at a price and as the forest gradually reveals the secret of why she was brought there the ghosts of her past return, reawakening forgotten memories of who and what she is, memories too of other abducted girls, each taken in turn, even back to savage prehistory.
When a retired and disillusioned priest comes seeking answers to explain the death of an old friend he is drawn into the girl's story, believing himself to be unwittingly cast as her saviour. But he is a regretful and inadequate hero, guilt-ridden and afraid, his body broken a lifetime ago in the trenches of Northern France and his faith weakened to ruin.
In a ferocious winter, time for the girl is running out. And the forest is eternally patient and forever hungry.
"The Girl on the Hill is an engrossing, deeply interesting book, both thought provoking and exciting. There are a number of abiding metaphors, and one is the forest that is both a beautiful and terrifying presence throughout the novel. There is a sense of being pulled by instinct down and far into a dark forest of the human psyche, so that when the author lets it, and light strikes, it is quite dazzling.
"The main business of the novel concerns Mary Meadow, an adolescent girl taken ill and sent to recuperate in the care of a brutally tough old women named Jenna Veesey. The status of the relationship, disturbing and undisclosed, shifts frequently governed somehow by the passing seasons and more powerfully by something within the forest itself.
"Bizarrely mixed up in this circumstance are two men, Lewis Bernard, an enthusiast and author, and James (Father) Stanford, a puzzled and puzzlingly broken survivor. These four exist in a fixed vortex, somehow fated and rippling out from before the First World War right into the present time - where we find ourselves confronted by the grandeur and frightening power of a nature from which we have stripped every ounce of meaning. In many ways this is a war novel - but there are many kinds of war fought in many kinds of forest.
"There are lots of books tackling one or two of the themes found in these pages but very few that do such justice to the range covered congruently here. This is a highly original story for that reason alone. Adolescence, identity, sexuality, trauma, war, faith and belief are blended, or, more accurately, seem to emerge as the storylines of the central characters come together."
