The Giant on the Skyline

Reviews

I was captivated by the intimacy of Clover’s writing about home, and what it means to her. The honesty and creativity with which she mines her life and heart are inspirational on so many levels. I sat down to read a chapter or two, and finished almost the entire book in a sitting - somehow this is what always happens to me with Clover’s work. Few writers I know have this intense intimacy, or such an immediately engaging effect on a reader. It really is magic. I can’t remember the last time I underlined so much and folded down so many pages in a book the way I have with this. What a wonderful, wise, magical book. I’ve loved all Clover Stroud’s books but The Giant on the Skyline is really quite incredible. Clover has turned her truth-seeing gaze on a tiny corner of the English landscape. This book is drenched in some of the most brilliant writing about place I’ve read in a long while. It’s as evocative as Laurie Lee, chalked up with Clover’s incisive, poetic encounters with magic, pain and belonging. A beautiful book, written in lyrical, liquid prose that seems to flow straight from the heart to the page. Clover Stroud is expert at bringing her reader right to the heart of her longing. Her writing is intimate and warm, honest and generous. A true memoirist, she looks to people and place as her canvas, in this case the psychic and physical hold of the landscape and what we call home. The Giant on the Skyline is timeless and yet firmly rooted in time, magical and mysterious and yet earthy and sensual. It is full of personality, humour and heart and I did not want it to end. In this new giant of a book, perhaps Clover’s most profound and moving, and unquestionably her most soaringly beautiful, Clover Stroud confronts the wrench from a place that might define her and shows how the resounding power of love tethers the soul. Expand reviews