Six months now till ADDLANDS puts in a proper appearance, though proofs have been around now for a few months. I am coming to like long lead times. They give you a chance to draw breath and look around and start to get a sense of what your book looks like to other people. It always takes some adjustment, this bit – discovering that your characters exist now in others’ heads. Recently some writers I (greatly) admire have taken the time to read and comment on ADDLANDS, so I thought I’d put up their comments while I fiddle with a proper page for this site…
‘Addlands is a gorgeous and painstaking evocation of the land and those who work it. Bullough’s writing is a joy – disciplined, observant and musical, blissfully free of cliché’
Andrew Miller
‘Addlands is a mesmerisingly beautiful experience, a haunting fusion of person, place and history. It is a really important contribution to the literature of the Welsh borders.’
Gerard Woodward
‘Tom Bullough’s story of one family’s struggle in a world of continuity and change is beautifully imagined and exquisitely told – passionate, lyrical, profound, sad, and sometimes, too, when you least expect it, very funny’
Carys Davis
‘I greatly admire his writing, which both requires – and generously rewards – close reading. Its visionary intensity is always thrilling, often moving.
Through a succession of brilliant word-paintings a group of interrelated characters evolves over seventy years. He handles a complex narrative with seemingly effortless skill and evokes circumscribed lives without condescension.
Few sheep-farmers in my valley – not so far from Tom’s – have children willing to continue the way-of-life he celebrates. He bravely chronicles ancient patterns of living whose future is insecure…
The English-Scottish border had that great novelist Sir Walter Scott to map its history : the English-Welsh March is imaginative territory Tom Bullough in his turn is making into his very own magical kingdom. What will he write next ?!’
Peter J. Conradi
Many thanks to them all! TB
