' 'It doesn't seem natural how that girl can make her way around so well when she can't see.' Lucy Pick's Pilgrimage intrigued me from the outset because she was writing about the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela at the same time as I was (my 12th Century story in Omphalos is set just a generation or so after hers, and, by coincidence, one of my characters is actually descended from one of hers). none had thought a wind lic this colde come for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleeman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness.' a great wind had come in the night and all was blown then and broc. When i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after after and for all time.

when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. ' the night was clere though i slept i seen it. It is a book that has divided my friends, much as it seems to have divided the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize (it made it onto the long-list, but not the short-list), some finding it unreadable, but others (including myself) dazzled by the author's use of the English language. Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake takes the reader into an England devastated and laid waste in the months following the Norman invasion of 1066.

Hand of Fire by Judith Starkston