God's Own Country

by RossRaisin (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $3.29

  'Ramblers. Daft sods in pink and green hats. It wasn't even cold. They moved down the field swing-swaying like a line of drunks, addled with the air and the land, and the smell of manure.' This is the voice of our narrator, Sam Marsdyke, the teenage son of a farmer up on the Yorkshire Moors. He spends his days working the sheep, mending fences, trying to dodge the eye of his brutal, silent father, and most of all, watching the transformation of the farms and villages around him. From the top of the moors he watches the goofy ramblers and the earnest 'towns', the families from York, who are feverishly buying up the farmhouses left empty by bankrupt farmers.And as he watches, one young daughter of a new family catches his eye. As he falls for the young, sophisticated girl from London, she begins to see him as a means to escape. She wants to rebel against her parents and he wants to fulfil the fantasy he harbours about her and so they run away together. But this journey across the moors will take a terrifying menacing turn which, for him, will prove his terrible undoing. Sam Marsdyke is an unforgettable character at the heart of this extraordinary novel, a novel that is hugely funny, darkly menacing and will resonate long after you have finished the last page.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.44

  Granta Best is a young British novelist. In Waterline, one of the most celebrated debut novels of recent years, Ross Raisin tells the story of solitary young farmer, Sam Marsdyke, and his extraordinary battle with the world. Expelled from school and cut off from the town, mistrusted by his parents and avoided by city incomers, Marsdyke is a loner until he meets rebellious new neighbour Josephine. But what begins as a friendship and leads to thoughts of escape across the moors turns to something much, much darker with every step. Powerful, engrossing, extraordinary, sinister, comic. A masterful debut . (Observer). Astonishing, funny, unsettling...An unforgettable creation [whose] literary forebears include Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield and Alex from A Clockwork Orange . (The Times). Remarkable, compelling, very funny and very disturbing ...like no other character in contemporary fiction . (Sunday Times). Ross Raisin was born in 1979 in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God's Own Country was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for nine literary awards including the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009 Ross Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He lives in London.

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $13.90

  Granta Best is a young British novelist. In Waterline, one of the most celebrated debut novels of recent years, Ross Raisin tells the story of solitary young farmer, Sam Marsdyke, and his extraordinary battle with the world. Expelled from school and cut off from the town, mistrusted by his parents and avoided by city incomers, Marsdyke is a loner until he meets rebellious new neighbour Josephine. But what begins as a friendship and leads to thoughts of escape across the moors turns to something much, much darker with every step. Powerful, engrossing, extraordinary, sinister, comic. A masterful debut . (Observer). Astonishing, funny, unsettling...An unforgettable creation [whose] literary forebears include Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield and Alex from A Clockwork Orange . (The Times). Remarkable, compelling, very funny and very disturbing ...like no other character in contemporary fiction . (Sunday Times). Ross Raisin was born in 1979 in West Yorkshire. His first novel, God's Own Country was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for nine literary awards including the Guardian First Book Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2009 Ross Raisin was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He lives in London.