HOLLOW IN THE LAND

The Hollow in the Land is a Lancashire valley no longer than ten miles end to end, ‘a cup of life in a big green mess of slopes and towns and farms’. If you’re born here, you’ll likely live your life out here, and even those who do make it beyond the bypass often find themselves drawn back. Through childhood hopefulness, teenage delinquency, faded first love and middle-aged disillusionment, James Clarke’s extraordinary novel in stories draws us into this place, where the realities of regional decline and political indifference are playing out in people’s lives: in run-down pubs and sitting rooms, dead-end jobs and black economy gigs, for-profit care homes, traveller sites and abandoned warehouses. Through a wide range of characters at every stage of life, Clarke shows us how much of what we become is defined by where we are from. Clarke’s writing is unsentimental but retains a fierce empathy for the lives it is describing, and shines a vital light on the realities of life in modern Britain. Some of these characters may be desperate, but here we see them in their full humanity: joyful, funny and defiant. With echoes of Jon McGregor, Sarah Hall, and Jim Crace, Hollow in the Land is a remarkable work of fiction by a young writer with a major career ahead of him.