Rather wonderfully, he tells the story of being recommended the book (in the mid-1970s) by the owner of a bookshop in Alderley called The Legend, which sounds like Chapter One in a magical adventure itself. He comes from Wilmslow, and very nice it is too – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. My boyfriend is a long-term admirer of Garner and particularly this book, and at least in part because the Edge was a place that he knew well. If you went down theer and go lost that’d be the end of you, for even if you missed falling down a hole you’d wander about in the dark until you upped and died.’

‘Yon place is riddled with tunnels and shafts from the owd copper-mines. ‘When you’re up th’Edge, see as you dunner venture down ony caves you might find, and keep an eye open for any holes in the ground,’ warns the farmer, an overtly dialect-defined heroic Cheshire man called Gowther Mossock. Their parents are away and they’ve come to Alderley to stay with a farmer friend of their mother’s. The town of Wilmslow is visited briefly, but Garner doesn’t disguise his disapproval of its suburban dwellings: where you make your home is very significant in this novel, even though we don’t really know where Colin and Susan, our young protagonists, come from. The setting is Cheshire, and specifically Alderley and its wild hills, evocatively known as the Edge. Not so much for the image of Durathror and his strange cloak, but the back cover image: a forest of blue shadows, and a bright yellow pinprick of a distant figure lost in their midst. I’m very fond of my Puffin edition, with its cover by George Adamson. It was his first novel, published all the way back before folk horror was invented, in 1960. Young readers have loved his work since 1960 and his first novel, ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, which first introduced his key subject – a very specific Edge in Cheshire. From the haunting ‘Owl Service’ to his gorgeous ‘Stone Book’, I’ve been a fan of Alan Garner’s for a while and it’s great to see his unique and daring work recognised.

An iconic writer for children in the 1960s, his work quickly moved to the outer limits of that literature, and since then his novels have been ever more challenging, strange and beautiful. ❉ Nick Campbell revisits Alan Garner’s first novel.Įarlier this year, Penguin Books published ‘First Light’, a tribute to a novelist who has lived and worked continually on ‘the Edge’.

The weirdstone of brisingamen review