Longlist for the Booker Prize 2023! A lyrical, emotion-filled novel about family happiness, parent-child love and overcoming trauma. The disappearance of a loved one changes not only the present and future, but also the person’s past. Marianne was only eight when her mother disappeared, and memories of the sunny garden, walks and fragrant pies seemed to fade. Was their family’s life really so cloudless if one day their mother simply left the house and never returned? This question torments Marianne; she seeks the answer to it in the old house and on the river bank, from her father, neighbors, and in medieval poetry. Searches as a child, a difficult teenager and an adult woman, having already become a mother herself. Is there a miracle that will help her regain her happy past, and with it change her future?

“An outstanding work - as a novel, as a meditation on grief and madness, and as a deeply felt, brilliant fantasy reworking of a 14th-century poem, which served as a source of inspiration. Deeply connected to the flora, fauna and rituals of the Cheshire village where the writer grew up and now lives, the novel creates a world in which paganism and medieval Christianity continue to imbue modernity with meaning in subtle and mysterious ways. <…> The book can be read as an extremely exciting psychological detective story. <…> In essence, this is an elegy of enormous power, transformed into prose” - Maureen Freeley, journalist, writer, translator

“Fascinating, convincing, beautifully written; The book brings myth and deep literary currents into a contemporary setting." - Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish poet, academic, medievalist and literary critic

"A ghost story, a folk story, a story of loss and family burden, "Pearl “ Shan Hughes is a charming and eerie exploration of how a child pieces together an ancient past - from medieval poetry - to hear the voices of lost loved ones again. A story about how we tell stories in the face of yawning abyss and deep sadness." - Sally Bailey, writer, lecturer in creative writing at Wadham College, Oxford University

"Sian Hughes' voice touches us because she has mastered a difficult art letters about strong feelings through the prism of wit - and this is a rare skill" - Hugo Williams, English poet, journalist, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize