Haweswater

Sarah Hall's first novel, set in the Lake District, is an anthem to landscape and a paean to a lost way of life.

Based on the evacuation and destruction of the village of Mardale to make way for the Haweswater reservoir in the 1930s, the story  revolves around the tempestuous life of Janet Lightburn, who fights her way into the world one freezing winter's night, causing her pious mother Ella to damn the God she worships. As Janet grows up, she inherits her mother's strong will, insisting upon helping her father Samuel on the family farm, and is inspired by the teacher at the village school to question and learn.

When Jack Liggett from the Manchester Water Company appears in the village one day to bring news of the impending construction of a dam and reservoir, Janet despises him and his message. Despite herself, however, she is drawn to this suave man, and he to Janet's elemental nature; they begin a troubled, intense and secret affair that will have tragic consequences.

Hall is so careful about the way in which she builds up her characters that we understand their motivations and, in the case of Janet and Jack, the intensity of their emotions. Even other minor characters (the Scottish landlord of the Dun Bull pub; the landscape artist traumatised by his experiences in the First World War; Nathaniel the respected old farmer) are drawn with a close attention to detail.

However, it is her evocation of place and of lives rooted in the land that truly gives this book its depth and resonance. The bitter harshness of the fells in winter, the endless rain of the spring and autumn, and the relentless heat of the summer inform and mould the lives of farmers intent on scratching a living from the poor land. The Lightburns are, in a way, merely extensions of the valley itself: Samuel's daily work is predicated by the seasons, Janet's brother Isaac is inexorably drawn to the water that surrounds them, and Janet herself is a wild construct of the elements among which she grows up.


Haweswater won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize

Sarah Hall's second novel, The Electric Michelangelo, is as striking as her first and was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize