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Laura is a writer based in a village outside York. After four years living and working in Brussels, she recently returned to the UK with husband and two small boys in tow. She now lives an altogether more rural existence, complete with wellies, open fire and a permanently filthy car. She runs her own digital copywriting business, Strike the Match, and lives for perfect bright and breezy running weather, mid-century interior design and anything with peanut butter in it.
Tara Westover’s Educated was one of the biggest books of 2018, topping awards and bestsellers lists across the world. It’s a memoir in which Westover - who, by the way, is still only 32 - recalls her upbringing in rural Idaho as part of a Mormon survivalist family. Her father, Gene, ...
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It’s time for something a little more contemporary here at The Hills: today’s book review is on All Among The Barley by Melissa Harrison, a book I was desperate to get my hands on as soon as it was published at the end of August this year.
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Often, when we pick up a book about the countryside, it’s because we want to read reverent descriptions of beautiful landscapes; to revel in the glory of the land we love. We want to read about things that stir something deep within us; “finches’ wings;/Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, ...
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I’ve got a confession to make. I love poetry. I’m not a stuffy academic or a lovelorn teenager. I’m not strange, or pretentious - well, at least, I dont think I am. I’ve just always loved verse; how it distils vast landscapes of feelings down to a tiny number of carefully-chosen words. ...
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Tarry Flynn, a young man in his mid 20s in 1930s staunchly Catholic Ireland, spends his days arguing with his mother, tending his smallholding and talking about girls with his friend, Eusebius...
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Rather than a book review this month, we’re going for something a little different here at The Hills - a review of An Audience With Amanda Owen. The event - an evening at Pocklington Arts Centre in Yorkshire’s East Riding - saw Amanda, famous for her remote life in the Yorkshire ...
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The Outrun is a memoir of addiction and recovery - and admittedly an apparently odd choice for a ‘countryside read’. But this is no ordinary AA story, and the Orkney Islands are key to both the author’s descriptions of addiction - living on the edge, literally and figuratively, facing a raging ...
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‘I bet he was a sod at school.’ That was my first impression of James Rebanks, author of this aggressively honest memoir about life as a shepherd in the Lake District.
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