The Rising Down Av Alexandra Harris

<p><b>''A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.'' RICHARD MABEY<br></b><b>''Humane, humorous and joyful.'' RUTH SCURR<br></b><br>When the celebrated critic and cultural historian Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. <br><br>As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects ¿ bringing a lifetime''s reading to bear on the place where she started ¿ hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area¿s past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? <br><br>From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters ¿ spanning the Downs, Poland, Australia, Canada - inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape.<br><br>By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds ¿a World in a