The Rising Down

A luminous feat of time travel chronicling lives in a Sussex landscape from the prize-winning author of Romantic Moderns and Weatherland.

These electrifying encounters - ranging from those with the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace - inspired her to imagine lives that, though seemingly distant, are deeply connected through this shared landscape.

'Remarkable.' THE TIMES
'Wonderful.' GUARDIAN
'Fascinating.' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A landscape-keyhole onto the whole world . . . Glorious.' Robert Macfarlane
'A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.' RICHARD MABEY


When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. These electrifying encounters - ranging from those with the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace - inspired her to imagine lives that, though seemingly distant, are deeply connected through this shared landscape. By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris opens vast new horizons.