The Barrowfields & The Valentine House published today
The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis and The Valentine House by Emma Henderson are both published today by Sceptre.
The New York Times calls The Barrowfields, "a work of abundant talent" with prose that has "the beautiful attention to detail that embeds us in place."
The Valentine House is written by acclaimed author of Grace Williams Says It Loud, and has been praised by Woman & Home as "vivid, complex, enthralling novel" and by Helen Lederer as "another compulsive original read".
Published by Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) in hardback6 April 2017, £18.99
The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis is a stunning, heart-breaking literary debut with the feel of a big American classic.
Mesmeric in its prose and mythic in its sweep, The Barrowfields is an extraordinary book about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparative power of shared pasts.
Snapped up by publishers across Europe, The Barrowfields, is a richly textured coming-of-age story about fathers and sons, home and family; while introducing a powerful new voice in fiction ripe to find a broad readership amongst fans of The Loney, Stoner, Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier.
Phillip Lewis is a writer living in Charlotte, North Carolina. He worked in a courtroom as a lawyer for around nine years, and wrote The Barrowfields across five years, whilst continuing to work as a lawyer.
The Valentine House, by award-winning author of Grace Williams Says It Loud, Emma Henderson:
Published by Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) in hardback 6 April 2017, £18.99
Emma Henderson’s debut novel, Grace Williams Says It Loud, was published to great acclaim in 2010. It won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award, the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Wellcome Book Prize and was runner-up for the Mind Book of the Year.
Her second novel, The Valentine House, has its roots in a remote valley in the French Alps, where she lived for six years. There she came across a chalet high in the mountains, built in 1858 by Sir Alfred Wills. A British mountaineer and judge who presided over Oscar Wilde’s trial, he inspired one of her central characters, Sir Anthony Valentine.
This finely wrought, superbly evocative and intriguing novel connects love and land, language and identity in a tale of two cultures and one family’s lasting impact on a woman and a place.
Emma Henderson went to school in London and studied at Somerville College, Oxford and Yale University. She wrote publisher’s blurbs for two years, then spent a decade teaching English in comprehensive schools and further education colleges, before moving to the French Alps where, for six years, she ran a ski and snowboard lodge. She now lives in Derbyshire and is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Keele University.
