In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garnerβs extraordinary Red Shift , a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.
Review
β Red Shift , with its passionately bickering adolescent lovers and its vertiginous plunges through the wormhole of time, shook me to the core every time I read it, and still does. . . . More than any orthodox work of historical fiction, it was this weird fantasy novel which taught me to look beyond the walls of my own era, my own reality. Garner makes the past numinous, terrifyingly real: anything but passed.β
βEmma Donoghue
βGarner squeezes language into depth charges which will detonate emotions at a level where words cannot reach.β
β The Listener
βA bitter, complex, brilliant book.β βUrsula Le Guin
βLong before Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling there was Alan Garner, a childrenβs author who crossed the boundaries between real and imaginary worldsβand between a young and an adult readership.β
β The Times(London) list of the 50 greatest British postwar writers
βA work of poetic imagination that will keep any adult mind at full stretch.β
β Daily Mail(London)
β. . . a magnificently multilayered novel. . . a superbly exciting piece of literature.β β The Sunday Times (London)
From the Publisher
Alan Garner's book The Owl Service was widely acclaimed:
"Without doubt Mr Alan Garner is one of the most exciting writers for young people today. He is producing work with strong plot structure, perceptive characterisation and vivid language." - Times Educational Supplement
"The Owl Service is not meant only for children or anyone else; it's a novel; and not many better novels will be published this year." - John Rowe Townsend, The Guardian
"Alan Garner is one of the outstanding present-day writers for children; and The Owl Service takes him a step further into more magical, legendary, adult worlds than he's gone so far." - Isabel Quigly, Catholic Herald
"No confirmation of the stature of Alan Garner as a writer of children's fiction is needed: if it were, his latest novel, The Owl Service , would establish it beyond doubt." - Financial Times