Courting Shadows (IGN Raised Relief 3-D Maps) - Hardcover

COURTING SHADOWS explores what stirs beneath the surface of the commonplace and familiar. As excavations beneath the village church bring buried lives to light, the novel s quietly appalling narrator is forced to confront events that his rational universe cannot accommodate. Jem Poster has written an exciting and evocative first novel, powerfully conceived and eloquently expressed it establishes him as a major new talent. - Julia Briggs As intelligent, daring and profound as it is highly, bewitchingly readable ... a fantastically tightly written, read-every-word novel - unnervingly shadowy in places, starkly, devastatingly well-lit in others ... As a psychological thriller, it's as close to wonderful as anything I've recently read ... Stannard is a stunning creation. - Julie Myerson, Guardian One of the best first novels I've read for a long time ... Poster mixes together the familiar ingredients with a subtlety that is rare in contemporary writing. - Ron Butlin, Glasgow Herald Satisfyingly creepy ... What distinguishes the book is not so much the plot but the imagination and prose, comparable to Michel Faber's work in its evocative quality ... this book is beautifully written, full of precision and intensity. - Jane Jakeman, Independent [Stannard's] descriptions are not only enjoyably exact but also full of the sense of disturbance they arouse in the villagers an

In the winter of 1881 John Stannard, a young architect, is in self-imposed exile in a remote English village carrying out repairs to the parish church. Arrogant and insensitive to the needs of others, he soon begins to inflict serious damage on the thirteenth century building itself and on those with whom he comes into contact, but this is nothing to the problems that arise when he catches the eye of beautiful ambitious young local girl Ann Rosewell. As the villagers turn nasty and lust leads him astray, Stannard struggles to keep a grip on his sanity and what begins as an innocent affair soon descends into a nightmarish journey that ends in murder. Courting Shadows is a gripping exploration of truth vs fiction, head vs heart and progress vs preservation. Most of all it is about the creation of fictions and our capacity to deceive not only each other but most of all ourselves.