Sheepshagger

Sheepshagger is the story of Ianto: the feral, inarticulate, inbred, ignoble savage; haunter of mountains, killer of innocents. Sheepshagger is also the story of Ianto the seer, the visionary - the genius loci - who comprehends Nature with a Blakean intensity, at one with the world he lives in: the moss and lichen, the lamb and the raven, the summit and the scree. But this novel is both these stories, both these people, and the character that emerges is one of the great creations of contemporary fiction. Robbed of his ancestral home - a near-derelict hovel in the mountains of west Wales - Ianto pledges revenge not only on the English yuppies who have turned his grandmother's cottage into a weekenders' barbecue party but on all those who have violated him and the land that is his. This latest act of colonial oppression and desecration triggers his lurid and strange imagination into unspeakable savagery - embodying our most primal fears of physical threat, a world beyond our control.This is an extraordinary prose Amalgam of Old Testament prophecy and demotic slang, of Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, Sheepshagger is written in a language charged to the highest level: lyrical and hieratic, saturated - like nature - in beauty and violence. And the spirit of its place, Ianto, at once both Caliban and Prospero, will hang in the memory of all who read his story like a devil or a god.