Land of the Living

Vivid, illuminating and unbearably tense, Land of the Living is a masterly meditation on trauma, on beauty, on the idea of home and the limits of love * Guardian *
Georgina Harding’s beautiful novels tell of wars, and troubled homecomings as traumatised fighting men try to re-enter interrupted marriages and homes grown strange ... Land of the Living is as wise and haunting as its predecessors * New Statesman, Books of the Year *
Georgina Harding’s beautiful novels tell of wars, and troubled homecomings as traumatised fighting men try to re-enter interrupted marriages and homes grown strange … Her Land of the Living is as wise and haunting as its predecessors -- Lucy Hughes Hallett * New Statesman, Books of the Year *
A quietly powerful novel * Observer *
Audacious and moving … Elegiac, often elliptical vignettes that immaculately simulate Charlie’s shame, regret and grief … Masterly * Sunday Times *
Remarkable and rare * Daily Mail *
Elegant and precise, Georgina Harding wonderfully describes Charlie’s sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating complex feelings to those who haven’t experienced war * Sunday Express *
Tremendously imaginative, really compassionate … Manages to make them almost tangibly real, really immersive -- Frances Macmillan * BBC Radio 4 ‘Open Book’ *
A lyrical novel about war and memory * Guardian, Ones to Watch 2018 *
In sombre, elegant prose, Harding wonderfully describes Charlie’s sense of dislocation, his emotional unease and the impossibility of communicating his complex feelings and fears to those closest to him -- Eithne Farry * Mail on Sunday, The Best New Fiction *
Revelatory in many ways, shining a light on the darker aspects of war … Quiet power and unexpected grace … Adds to Harding’s reputation as an incisive chronicler of war and its aftermath * Financial Times *
Written with an admirable precision, and the dark of the narrative has to be teased out … It is a novel of ideas, for it invites you to think of questions of responsibility, exploitation, cruelty, brutality ... One of those rare novels which has you thinking, when you reach the end, that there is much you have passed over which demands a second reading to be fully felt and understood -- Allan Massie * Scotsman *
Over several restrained, poetic novels, Georgina Harding has carved out a space for herself as one of the most incisive explorers of physical adversity and its psychological effects … Harding’s graceful style and self-control illuminate the crushing weight of history on the individual, and how different strategies for survival can cause a lifetime of pain and regret … Land of the Living is a poised and carefully crafted novel of powerful, submerged emotions, taking an under-explored aspect of Britain’s war and finding in it something graceful and strange, mythic as well * Herald *
Disquieting * Times Literary Supplement *
Perfect – a flawless gem of a novel from start to finish … Wonderful, strange and wise -- Patrick McGrath