Haweswater

<p><b>The prizewinning debut from Britain''s most exciting contemporary novelist.</b><br><br>In a remote dale in a northern English county, a centuries-old rural community has survived into the mid-1930s almost unchanged. But then Jack Liggett drives in from the city, the spokesman for a Manchester waterworks company with designs on the landscape for a vast new reservoir. The dale must be evacuated, flooded, devastated; its water pumped to the Midlands and its community left in ruins.<br><br>Liggett further compounds the village''s problems when he begins a troubled affair with Janet Lightburn, a local woman of force and character who is driven to desperate measures in an attempt to save the valley.<br><br>Told in luminous prose, with an intuitive sense for period and place, <i>Haweswater</i> remembers a rural England that has been lost for many decades.</p>