Imprint
- Corsair
Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Set in a world blanketed by snow as the result of an environmental disaster, Wivenhoe explores complicity, love, loyalty, and the boundaries of human instinct.
'Compelling . . . this is a fable for the times ahead that feels essential' Irish Times 'Stunning, insightful, deeply humane prose . . . Fisher indicts all of us yet still offers hope that we may change the ending of this story' Olivia Sudjic
A young man is found brutally murdered in the middle of the snowed-in village of Wivenhoe. Over his body stands another man, axe in hand. The gathered villagers must deal with the consequences of an act that no-one tried to stop.
WIVENHOE is a haunting novel set in an alternate present, in a world that is slowly waking up to the fact that it is living through an environmental disaster. Taking place over twenty-four hours and told through the voices of a mother and her adult son, we see how one small community reacts to social breakdown and isolation.
Samuel Fisher imagines a world, not unlike our own, struck down and on the edge of survival. Tense, poignant, and set against a dramatic landscape, WIVENHOE asks the question: if society as we know it is lost, what would we strive to save? At what point will we admit complicity in our own destruction?
Praise for Wivenhoe
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Quiet, fable-like menace radiates from every page of Wivenhoe. Elegant and searching, it asks vital questions about what it means to be part of a community - about integrity, belonging, and how darkness can go unchecked when isolation and suspicion sets in - questions that now feel more relevant than ever.
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Wivenhoe explores the ways disasters make us both less and more ourselves. I was particularly moved by Fisher's careful tallying of the small choices that are made within a family - the secret hurts and private allegiances. While it is a book about climate change, dystopias and all, it is at the root about love. I loved it.
Samuel Fisher
Samuel Fisher is a writer, bookseller and publisher. His debut novel, The Chameleon (Salt, 2018) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize, shortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prize and won a Betty Trask in 2019. He co-owns Burley Fisher Books in Hackney and is a director of Peninsula Press.
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