Product Description

Sarah Hall's first novel is set in 1936 in a remote dale in the old county of Westmoreland, and tells of the flooding of the dale to make way for a reservoir, against the wishes of many of the local hill farmers. It is a story of love, obsession and the destruction of a community.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40466 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 267 pages

Review
'First impression: here is a new writer of show-stopping genius; everyone should buy this novel... I stand by my original impressions. Go forth and buy; prepare to weep'. Helen Falconer, Guardian 'A strikingly original first novel, full not just of fury but also of the most sensitive compassion for the people and the place, and an understanding of both which is rare.' Margaret Forster 'One of the most impressive debuts I have read.' The Times

The Guardian, 23 March 2002
She has a poet's feel for original language and imagery.

The Times, 22 June 2002
Her prose is rich, clear, cold, full of images and immensely sensual. A remarkable debut.

Customer Reviews

A majestic read
This is as powerful first novel as you could hope for. Set in the 1930s, the novel charts the disintegration of a farming community in the Lake District, northern England. Close-knit, and largely unchanged for generations, the village is ripped apart by the incursion of the Manchester Water Board who appropriate the valley in order that they can flood it to create a reservoir. The villagers are forced to move out, abandoning their homes and their way of life. Haweswater vividly brings to life the a clash of an old, agricultural way of life with the inevitable encroachment of modernity and industrialistaion.

If the backdrop is the scenery of lakes, valleys and mountains, at the foreground is the Lightburn family, mother and father, son and daughter. Janet Lightburn, a headstrong young woman who reaches out beyond the confines of the valley, falls in love with the natural enemy, the architect of the reservoir project. Despite themselves the love grows, secretly at first, and with tragic consequences. All the while, as we become more involved with the characters and the drowning of the past, the valley is being flooded, inch by creeping inch, creating an uncanny and unsettling sense of impending doom.

The writing is majestic and bewitching, laced with poetry while never spilling into melodrama or pretention. You'll love it!

Near perfect
Sarah Hall's Haweswater has about it, like the Cumbrian landscape it so hauntingly portrays, a foreboding terrible beauty. In its depiction of farming life and the rhythms of speech it simultaneously captures a place and time and yet is timeless.
That this is a first novel is amazing enough - that it is written by an author so young makes it doubly so. I had begun to fear that authors like Zadie Smith and Hari Kunzru were the best my generation has to offer. Thank God for Sarah Hall who seems to truly understand what literature is about and what it can do - this novel is in the tradition of greats like Thomas Hardy ( the impact of modernity on an unchanging world reminds one of "The Woodlanders") and D.H. Lawrence.
The story builds towards an inevitably unhappy ending but within that there is the kernel of hope, and I particularly liked the way one event in the novel gives rise to a local myth.
The writing is poetic, and on occassion the metaphors can be a little off the mark, but these flaws are few and do not detract from a marvelous book that deserves to be widely read. I shall look forward to the author's next work.

Haunted
I picked up Haweswater on a whim while traveling, and read it twice in quick succession. While Ms. Hall's intuitive grasp of landscape, her unwavering understanding of plot, and her eerily poetic language are all to be loudly commended, it is her characters that have haunted my mind ever since. Janet Lightburn prowls through the novel like a creature born onto the wrong planet, perhaps into the wrong skin, and the vague terror her other-worldliness instills in both her parents (her father detects a "low growl" emanating from her chest when she's a child; her mother senses that she's "spilling at the edges" as a grown woman) makes her all the more thrilling and inscrutable a heroine. Samuel Lightburn, perhaps the emotional center of the novel, is unforgettable in his silent, steadfast complicity with fate, and Ella Lightburn is downright electrifying from the beginning of the novel, when she walks away from her own newborn and, still bloody from labor, marches alone to church. Meanwhile, Ms. Hall sets up Isaac Lightburn's demise with such finesse and subtlety along the way that when it finally occurs, one feels that one has been privy to a long, half-understood secret that at last makes terrible sense. I will wait very impatiently indeed for Ms. Hall's second novel.