The High House: Shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award

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I missed father, but I didn’t miss the way I had to make myself seem happy for him, and I missed Francesca too, but not the feeling she brought into a room that we were all failing against standards that were impossible to match, and not the fear she also brought, the constant awareness of consequences that she would let us neither forget nor ignore.

Ancient High House | Stafford Borough Council The Ancient High House | Stafford Borough Council

Sometimes he let me bury his feet in the sand or, if it was hot enough, took me into the sea to swim, holding me under the armpits while I splashed.There is a kind of organic mercy, grown deep inside us, that makes it so much easier to care about small, close things, else how could we live?

The High House by Jessie Greengrass, review: affecting but

Perched on a hill above a village by the sea, the high house has a mill, a vegetable garden and a barn full of supplies. Caro does not need to spell out that “Sally was a counterweight, the other half of me that Pauly needed”; the subtler passages convey that just fine. All summer I ran, half-naked, through the fine days, and when the weather broke, bringing rains so heavy that the water fell in long ropes through the air, I sat inside the high house and watched it from the window, marveling at the quantity of it and the force, how it scoured what it touched, washing crisp packets out of hedges, flattening shrubs, cleaning dust—and then, next morning, it would be hot again, but the air would be filled with steam; and the sea, where the river ran into it, stained with mud. Take Jenny Offill’s Weather, its fragmented structure mimicking her narrator’s experience of everyday anxieties rubbing up against overwhelming fears about “the coming chaos”.Yet there are limits to their safety, limits to the supplies, limits to what Grandy—the former village caretaker, a man who knows how to do everything—can teach them as his health fails.