God's Own Country

Expelled from school for an incident that shadows him still, Marsdyke works on his father’s hill farm on the Yorkshire Moors. From a distance, he watches as outsiders buy holiday cottages and flashy new bars open in the local towns.

When a new family moves into the area, Marsdyke begins a friendship with the defiant teenage daughter, but as his mind descends into a state of dangerous delusion, their relationship descends into something more disquieting.

Replete with dialect (‘I glegged another look at my watch’), Raisin’s dark tale has an unhinged quality that never strays from its perfectly realised world. Nothing is superfluous in this tense, unsettling and at times very funny novel.