I have lived in North Norfolk for more than thirty years and grown to love its creeks, dunes, crumbling cliffs, and atmospheric church towers. I’ve spent years working in a shed in the garden of my remote flint cottage (originally built as a hovel), writing features for national newspapers and magazines. I’ve visited grand old mansions with eccentric aristocratic owners; become familiar with the setting for L.P. Harley’s The Go-Between; been fascinated by the steam trains and railways that once linked ocean and fen; listened to skeins of geese flying overhead each winter; and been transported by the spiritual dimension in the vast horizontals of land, sea, and sky.
I love this quirky comic 1959 novel about civil servant Jasper, who is sent off to the fictional village of Arcady on the Norfolk/Suffolk border to assess unusual goings-on in a big country house. It has all the fun of Nancy Mitford with top notes of P.G.Wodehouse.
Jasper falls in love with both daughters of eccentric legless aristocrat Lord Flamborough, who lives on a steam train on his own private railway. There is a fete, cricket on the green, and many romantic misunderstandings.
Luminous and poetic, this is a richly imagined memoir of an anchoress in the 14th century.
Julian had herself bricked into a room at the side of a church in Norwich in order to spend the rest of her life thinking, praying, and helping visitors who come to her window. In this cell, she experiences a kind of spiritual freedom.
We get a wonderful sense of Norwich in upheaval during the plague years. She offers comfort to all in her most famous words. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing (no s) shall be well.”
'I was completely hooked and considerably moved by the life and thoughts of this exceptional woman' - JEREMY IRONS
'It is as if we have finally found the lost autobiography of one of the medieval world's most important women.' - JANINA RAMIREZ
'A beautiful, intensely moving achievement' - A.N. WILSON
In 1347, the first pestilence rages across the land. The young Julian of Norwich encounters the strangeness of death: first her father, then later her husband and her child. When she falls ill herself, she encounters mystical visions that bring comfort and concern. But in the midst of suspicion and…
A brilliant scholar, ancient libraries in danger due to war, suppressed women’s religious history, and a renegade monastery.
A doggedly determined Sofia Papandréou pursues evidence for women in leadership in early Christianity in the dusty corners of libraries, long ignored. Or worse, actively hidden away to deny women their heritage…
I’ve always loved this book and have paid homage to it by naming the local aristocrat in my novel Lord Hartley.
The book is set in 1900, and adolescent schoolboy Leo spends the long, hot summer with his wealthy schoolfriend Marcus at Brandham Hall, Norfolk. The boy copes with agonising class differences, lost innocence, and eventual breakdown. He is undone in his role as messenger for the daughter of the house, who is having a steamy affair with the tenant farmer next door.
The book was turned into a film, set at Melton Constable Hall (my model for Swan Hall in The Sitter), Heydon, and Norwich.
L.P. Hartley's moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.
'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The…
All the wonders of the thousands of geese that fly through the winter across the enormous Norfolk skies, baggy fields, and marshes are here.
Acheson spent lockdown cycling furiously along the coast on his mother’s old red pushbike following the pinkfeet and many other species of geese, describing his great love affair with them.
On his epic journey, he talks to ecologists, farmers, birders, and scientists. He writes with an encyclopaedic knowledge, uncontrolled passion, and great vulnerability.
WINNER - BOOK OF THE YEAR - East Anglian Book Awards 2023
The Telegraph
As seen on BBC Winterwatch 2023
'Honest, human and heart-grabbing. I loved this book so much.' Sophie Pavelle, author of Forget Me Not
'Delightful' Stephen Moss, author of Ten Birds that Changed the World
'Fascinating and thought-provoking' Jake Fiennes, author of Land Healer
'Awe-filled and absorbing' Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down
The Meaning of Geese is a book of thrilling encounters with wildlife, of tired legs, punctured tyres and inhospitable weather. Above all, it is the story…
A brilliant scholar, ancient libraries in danger due to war, suppressed women’s religious history, and a renegade monastery.
A doggedly determined Sofia Papandréou pursues evidence for women in leadership in early Christianity in the dusty corners of libraries, long ignored. Or worse, actively hidden away to deny women their heritage…
A heroic poem woven around the tides and spires of North Norfolk.
Jess Streeting tells her own story of returning as an adult to Cawston in Norfolk and remembering fun-filled childhood days with her father, an inspirational vicar, in the mid-70s. One single terrible event ripped her father away from her, and only now is she confronting what happened. There are shy girls, smart lads, and a great hammer beam church roof with carved angels.
The foreword is by one of those smart boys, Sir Stephen Fry.
Jessica Streeting and her family - sister Alice, mother Judith and father Revered Paul Farnham - move east in their ancient London taxi to the deep countryside of Norfolk. It is 1975 and the rector has a new position at the church of St Agnes in the village of Cawston. Here they find a world populated by people who embody both the ancient and new of late 20th century rural life. Children of the soil, whose parents work it and depend on it, living a simple life as old as their church. The musical ones. The clever ones. The artists,…
An adolescent baker’s boy, Jack, catches sight of a beautiful woman alighting from a train at dusk. His remote Norfolk village is built around a vast railway maintenance hub known as The Works, which is ruled by hierarchy, punctuality, and Methodism. Newcomer Rosie is escaping a relationship with a well-known London cartoonist with an enthusiasm for photographic erotica.
Drama unfolds against the hardworking lives of the railwaymen and the drumbeat of trains coming and going in 1900 and 1901. Thoughts about women’s rights, sexual freedom, religion, art, and pornography are woven through the story.
