And Then Gone (Paperback) (Richard Skelton)

‘a ritual, a beating of the bounds of memory 

… as much a haunting as a book’

(Justin Hopper)

 

*

 

‘it courses like a dark and turbid river’

(Brian Lavelle)

 

*

 

‘a gripping emotional topography’

(Emily Oldfield)

 

*

 

‘An unnerving story of the ancient, intangible and occult’

(Luke Turner)

In the wake of an unnamed calamity a solitary woman travels back to her childhood home, navigating the maze of narrow roads that cross-cut England’s hinterlands below Hadrian’s Wall. In the absence of human contact, the agency of the land itself begins to impress itself upon her consciousness, and, as her journey unfolds, her life and the lives of the dead, both recent and ancient, slowly reveal themselves as inextricably intertwined.

 

​Richard Skelton’s second work of fiction continues his exploration of the relationship between landscape and human identity. Whereas The Look Away focused on a claustrophobic, individual encounter, And Then Gone expands to extend the narrative into the deep past, and the stories of lives now ‘flattened between the pages of earth.’