The Rising Down

'Remarkable.' THE TIMES
'Wonderful.' GUARDIAN
'Fascinating.' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'A landscape-keyhole onto the whole world . . . Glorious.' Robert Macfarlane
'A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.' RICHARD MABEY
When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area's past. These electrifying encounters - ranging from those with the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace - inspired her to imagine lives that, though seemingly distant, are deeply connected through this shared landscape. By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris opens vast new horizons.

Alexandra Harris is an acclaimed writer, literary critic and cultural historian. She was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute and is now Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper(2010) won the Guardian First Book Award, a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, adapted for BBC Radio 4 and chosen ten times as a 'Book of the Year'. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Harris reviews for the Guardian and other newspapers as well as judging literary prizes, writing for exhibition catalogues, working with artists, lecturing widely and speaking on the radio. alexandraharris.co.uk
'A joy to read.' Sunday Times
'Breathtaking.' Guardian
'Highly eclectic and original.' Sunday Telegraph
'Hugely ambitious.' TLS
'The wit and wonder of an exceptional literary work.' New Statesman
'An inspiring guide.' Daily Mail