Starve Acre
The worst thing possible has happened. Richard and Juliette Willoughby's son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of five. Starve Acre, their house by the moors, was to be full of life, but is now a haunted place.
Juliette, convinced Ewan still lives there in some form, seeks the help of the Beacons, a seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Richard, to try and keep the boy out of his mind, has turned his attention to the field opposite the house, where he patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree.
Starve Acre is a devastating new novel by the author of the prize-winning bestseller The Loney. It is a novel about the way in which grief splits the world in two and how, in searching for hope, we can so easily unearth horror.
Andrew Michael Hurley
Andrew Michael Hurley (born 1975) is a British writer whose debut novel, The Loney, was published in a limited edition of 278 copies on 1 October 2014 by Tartarus Press and was published under Hodder and Stoughton's John Murray imprint in 2015. He was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Open Book programme "British Gothic" in October 2015.
The Loney has been reviewed in The Guardian and The Telegraph. It is set in the area of Morecambe Bay in north west England, described in the text as "that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune". Hurley has said that the novel's two starting points were "to write a kind of dark version of the Nativity [...] and exploring ideas of faith and belief" and "various wild, lonely places on the north west coast of Lancashire [...] a sense of imminent menace or dormant power lying just under the sand and the water". It is the winner of the 2015 Costa Book Awards First Novel Award as well as the British Book Industry award for best debut fiction and book of the year.
More books by Andrew Michael Hurley
