Description

**The Times instant Top Ten bestseller**

**Named a book to look out for in 2024 by the Sunday Times, Guardian and BBC**

**A small hardback edition featuring an afterword by the author**

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting and haunting Christmas short story

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‘A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They’re the same thing really.’

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees – and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst – and the path of her life is changed forever.

‘Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke has made the very notion of genre seem quaint’ Guardian
‘A miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling’ Madeline Miller

**With exquisite illustrations by Victoria Sawdon**

Publisher Review

Praise for Susanna Clarke: ‘Clarke creates a world beyond our wildest imagination that also tells us something profound about what it is to be human — Bernardine Evaristo, Women’s Prize Chair of Judges 2021 What a world Susanna Clarke conjures into being — David Mitchell A miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling — Madeline MIller Like Hilary Mantel, Clarke made the very notion of genre seem quaint * Guardian * One of the greatest and most interesting writers of fantasy in the past hundred years or more * Times Literary Supplement * A treasure, washed up upon a forgotten shore, waiting to be discovered — Erin Morgenstern Purely joyful reading — Naomi Alderman Utterly compelling – bewildering, intense, moving, shocking, combining a haunting fantasy with sharp insight — Rowan Williams As beloved fantasy writer Clarke’s atmospheric and gently funny fable about the holiness of nature, so gracefully illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, unfurls, Merowdis experiences a transformative encounter. * Booklist *