Sun Country

<p><b>'One of Britain's most distinctive and trustworthy voices ... A beautiful book' </b>TIM WINTON<br><b>'A book to lose yourself inside, and emerge from with enhanced clarity and wisdom' </b>FRANCES WILSON<br><b>'Tender and unflinching ... A masterclass in clarity and feeling'</b> JIM CRACE<br><b>'Cunnell writes with so much sensitivity to the sacredness of the everyday' </b>SARA BAUME<br><b><br><u>A beautifully written, courageous and deeply moving journey from sorrow to acceptance, from loss to hope, shimmering with coastal light and hard-won wisdom.</u></b><br><br>In <i>Sun Country</i>, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beachlands of his boyhood after the death of his mother.<br><br>A love letter to the changing coast and sea, <i>Sun Country </i>is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art. At the heart of the book is Gillian, his devoted single mother, and the small yet unforgettable details of her life that are woven into a powerful meditation on impermanence, grief, class and solitude.<br><br>At once intimate and expansive, this luminous memoir traces one man’s journey from loss back towards life. Through stories about the writers and painters with whom he feels a kinship – including the English Romantics, W. H. Hudson and Agnes Martin – and the history of his own Sussex working-class family, Cunnell writes his way home to a place, to a culture and to himself as an artist.<br><br>Cunnell’s descriptive power, so widely praised in his first memoir, reaches a new breathtaking level, with the simplicity that only comes from the finest craft and poetry.</p>