About this ebook
To the casual outsider, Hill Farm is a rural idyll and the perfect retreat from urban life. Yet beneath the tranquil surface lie discontent, desire and death-watch beetles.
Farmer Hayes loves the land - but hates farming. His neglected wife Isabel adores her three children, but is temperamentally unsuited to life as a wife and mother. The Smith sisters have not spoken to one another for forty years, farm-hand Mikey dabbles in pyromania, while neighbour Mr Payne has fled the city, only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England. And after one incendiary summer, all of their lives will be different...
Originally published with the title Hill Farm
Farmer Hayes loves the land - but hates farming. His neglected wife Isabel adores her three children, but is temperamentally unsuited to life as a wife and mother. The Smith sisters have not spoken to one another for forty years, farm-hand Mikey dabbles in pyromania, while neighbour Mr Payne has fled the city, only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England. And after one incendiary summer, all of their lives will be different...
Originally published with the title Hill Farm
About the author
Miranda France is a writer and translator. The author of two highly acclaimed travel books, Bad Times in Buenos Aires and Don Quixote's Delusions, she has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She has translated Argentine writers including Alberto Manguel, Claudia Piñeiro and Liliana Heker. She grew up on a farm not unlike the farm that featured in her first novel, That Summer at Hill Farm, but now lives in London with her husband and two children. The Day Before the Fire is her second novel.
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