Andrew Michael Hurley’s next novel, Barrowbeck, has been signed by John Murray as the publisher reissues the author’s backlist to accompany the upcoming “Starve Acre” film.
Ten years after the publication of Hurley’s multi-award-winning debut, The Loney (John Murray), Barrowbeck “will be a major publication for John Murray this autumn, cementing Hurley’s reputation as an extraordinary literary writer who has been credited with leading the folk horror revival,” the publisher said.
Jocasta Hamilton, executive publisher, has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights for five figures from Lucy Luck at Conville and Walsh.
Barrowbeck will be published on 24 October 2024 at £16.99 hardback, e-book and in audiobook by John Murray.
John Murray said: “Barrowbeck is set in a remote valley on the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, where the inhabitants have lived uneasily with forces beyond their reckoning for centuries. They raise their families, work the land, and do their best to welcome those who come seeking respite. But there is an inscrutable otherness that runs through the village as persistently as the river.
"As one generation gives way to the next and ancient land is carved up in the name of progress, darkness gathers. The people of Barrowbeck have forgotten that they have only ever been guests in the valley. Now they must leave. Two thousand years of history is coming to an end.”
Hurley said: “Barrowbeck has demanded something new of me as a writer in every conceivable way. Its scope, its interweaving voices, its echoing themes, have made me think differently about how I use the novel form. It’s a story about one particular place in England but the struggles are universal. The valley’s fate is the potential fate of the world.”
Hamilton said: “Andrew writes with a vivid, terrifying beauty. In Barrowbeck his imagination roams over a small valley as its people suffer, struggle and change over two thousand years in an extraordinary novel that is both haunting and otherworldly and yet grounded and precise.”
In addition John Murray will reissue the author’s previous books, The Loney, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre, on 6th September to coincide with the release of the film adaptation of the latter novella. “Starve Acre” will be released in cinemas on 6th September and stars Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark, and was selected to represent Britain at the London Film Festival last autumn.
The Loney, was originally published by Tartarus Press as a 300-copy limited edition, before being republished by John Murray. It went on to sell in 20 languages, win the Costa Best First Novel Award and the Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. Devil’s Day, his second novel, was picked as a Book of the Year in five newspapers and won the Encore Award.