The Wake: A Novel Binding: Paperback

A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting. Eimear McBride,New Statesman

In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers.
InThe Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear.
Written in what the author describes as a shadow tonguea version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern readerThe Wakerenders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster's world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions,The Wakeis both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

The Wakeis a masterpiece. My top book of the year.Eleanor Catton, Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize

A book unlike any other, brilliant in its rarity and brutal, ugly truth. . . . Kingsnorth has brought forth a remarkable narrator through whom we can see (and smell and taste) the burnt fields and bodies, the skeletal trees and smoldering firesa world sickly similar to so many lesser visions of destruction, but given fresh and horrifying weight here by a mad experiment in language that has become a raw and powerful masterpiece.NPR

Like Tolkiens and Martins books,The Wakepresents the reader with an immersive experience. . . . What sharply distinguishes it is its disorienting use of high literary experiment and its insistence on uncertainty. . . .The Wakereminds us that we cant find our way out of our crisis as easily as many think.
Bookforum

Kingsnorth does not simply tell history: He invites the reader to inhabit it. . . . At once invigorating and terrifying. History almost a thousand years old feels intense and immediate, as close as the blood in ones veins and the memories one cant escape.Star Tribune(Minneapolis)

Kingsnorths captivating first novel is thought provoking, multi-faceted and intriguingly rendered. . . . [The Wake] will satisfy motivated readers of history, ecology and the persistent pull of the old gods.Shelf Awareness

Powerful eloquence, a brusque beauty, that moves and convinces. More than a mere novel,The Wakeis really a medieval epic poem to an English way of life that would be erased forever.The Arts Fuse

A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting.EimearMcBride,New Statesman

The Wakeis an astonishing accomplishment. . . . At first the prospect seems unreadably off-putting; within twenty pages you get the hang of it; by thirty the suddenly fluent reader is immersed entirely in the mental and geographical contours of the era. But it works the other way too: we are seeingand feeling and hearingthe living roots of Englishness.Geoff Dyer

Extraordinary.Philip Pullman

A resonant, eloquent ballad of English identity, pride and fierce independence. It is a thrilling story. Read it out loud. It is like nothing else.Mark Rylance

Kingsnorths debut novel re-creates the mysterious joy that accompani