The Still Point | Granta

  • Published: 13/12/2010
  • ISBN: 9781846272301
  • 129x20mm
  • 320 pages

The Still Point

Amy Sackville

At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and vanishes into the icy landscape without a trace. He leaves behind a young wife, Emily, who awaits his return for decades, her dreams and devotion gradually freezing into rigid widowhood. A hundred years later, on a sweltering mid-summer’s day, Edward’s great-grand-niece Julia moves through the old family house, attempting to impose some order on the clutter of inherited belongings and memories from that ill-fated expedition, and taking care to ignore the deepening cracks within her own marriage. But as afternoon turns into evening, Julia makes a discovery that splinters her long-held image of Edward and Emily’s romance, and her husband Simon faces a precipitous choice that will decide the future of their relationship. Sharply observed and deeply engaging, The Still Point is a powerful literary debut and a moving meditation on the distances – geographical and emotional – that can exist between two people.

If Virginia Woolf had had a younger sister with a passionate interest in icebergs, she might have written something like this beautiful, unearthly novel, in which the secrets of a house and of a marriage continually open out onto a wild glare of Arctic light

Francis Spufford, author of THE CHILD THAT BOOKS BUILT

Sackville writes with great assurance and wonderfully evokes both the polar landscape and the atmosphere of the period. And I liked her interweaving of past and present. A most promising debut

Penelope Lively

Spanning a single day, the novel's dream-like structure belies its linguistic and emotional precision ... a poised beginning

Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail

The Author

Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and last year completed the MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths. She is the author of The Still Point (which won the John Llewellyn Rhys award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize) and Orkney which won a Somerset Maugham Award. www.amysackville.com

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