And Then Gone (Hardcover) Richard Skelton

Clothbound hardcover book

Verdant green cover

Metallic green foil debossed sigil

Fawn endpapers, head & tail bands

 

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Signed and numbered

 

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Edition of 111

‘a ritual, a beating of the bounds of memory 

… as much a haunting as a book’

(Justin Hopper)

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In the wake of an unnamed calamity a solitary woman travels back to her childhood home, navigating the maze of narrow roads that cross-cut England’s hinterlands below Hadrian’s Wall. In the absence of human contact, the agency of the land itself begins to impress itself upon her consciousness, and, as her journey unfolds, her life and the lives of the dead, both recent and ancient, slowly reveal themselves as inextricably intertwined.

 

‘it courses like a dark and turbid river’

(Brian Lavelle)

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Richard Skelton’s second work of fiction continues his exploration of the relationship between landscape and human identity. Whereas The Look Away focused on a claustrophobic, individual encounter, And Then Gone expands to extend the narrative into the deep past, and the stories of lives now ‘flattened between the pages of earth.’

 

‘a gripping emotional topography’

(Emily Oldfield)