Part of Series
A major novel from one of the country’s greatest writers, and the crowning achievement of an astonishing career, BONELAND is also the long-awaited conclusion to the story of Colin and Susan – a story that began over fifty years ago in THE WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN… A woman was reading a book to a child on her knee. “‘So the little boy went into the wood, and he met a witch. And the witch said, “You come home with me and I’ll give you a good dinner.”’ Now you wouldn’t go home with a witch, would you?” Colin stood. “Young man. Do not go into the witch’s house. Do not. And whatever you do, do not go upstairs. You must not go upstairs. Do not go! You are not to go!” Professor Colin Whisterfield spends his days at Jodrell Bank, using the radio telescope to look for his lost sister in the Pleiades. At night, he is on Alderley Edge, watching. At the same time, and in another time, the Watcher cuts the rock and blows bulls on the stone with his blood, and dances, to keep the sky above the earth and the stars flying. Colin can’t remember; and he remembers too much. Before the age of thirteen is a blank. After that he recalls everything: where he was, what he was doing, in every minute of every hour of every day. Everything he has read and seen. And then, finally, a new force enters his life, a therapist who might be able to unlock what happened to him when he was twelve, what happened to his sister. But Colin will have to remember quickly, to find his sister. And the Watcher will have to find the Woman. Otherwise the skies will fall, and there will be only winter, wanderers and moon…
Author
Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect. Born into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973). Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan\_Garner Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
