That Summer at Hill Farm

It was the summer that everything changed... A sparkling, witty debut, perfect for fans of Kate Atkinson, Stella Gibbons and Joanna Trollope

Beautifully rendered, the shifting inner lives of the characters are subtle and believable and the fresh, sometimes subversive observation is a delight

Miranda France writes skillfully and with a wry touch... That Summer at Hill Farm is a pleasure to read, tempting the reader to wolf it down in one

An arresting writer...France's account of village life conveys a genuine, smoldering anger... Adultery, arson and assault - all come bursting out

Pyromaniac labourers, feuding pensioners and adulterous housewives blot the landscape in Miranda France's entertaining novel, a sort of homage to Cold Comfort Farm, with a dash of Jilly Cooper and The Archers thrown in

With an incredible confidence for a debut novelist, Miranda France changes tack from rural romance to murder mystery...[she] writes with such assurance and humour that she carries us along...through the subtle underpinning of her characterization

Reads like The Archers written by Tolstoy...This debut novel from a well-known travel scribe twists coming-of-age drama with Karenina-esque sensual discovery, and perfectly captures the more Gothic aspects of country life

Miranda France has minutely drawn a farming community, and a broken woman, with excellent skill. She is superb at plucking comedy from tragedy, as well as exhibiting a wry authorial narrative that must owe more than a little to Jane Austen. She manages to square this lightness of tone with a subtle tale full of secrecy, betrayal and fear that keeps you clinging on right to the very end

A convincing depiction of the way in which ordinary lives can be nudged towards quiet tragedy

France writes superbly about the reality of living in the countryside - and the pitch-black ending chills the blood.

It's impossible to avoid comparisons with Stella Gibbons...But Miranda France's debut novel is set in modern-day Sussex and she has drawn on her farming roots to a paint a picture of bucolic pastures.

Immensely clever unearthing of rural life and love

A clear-eyed, wise and subtle debut novel from a novelist to watch. Miranda France´s depiction of  a vanishing rural Britain is packed with characters and events that ring coruscatingly true.

There is so much to admire in this novel:  authorial eloquence, sly wit and the multi-faceted evocation of a rural community.

Miranda France is a writer and translator. The author of two highly acclaimed travel books, Bad Times in Buenos Aires and Don Quixote's Delusions, she has won the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She has translated Argentine writers including Alberto Manguel, Claudia Piñeiro and Liliana Heker. She grew up on a farm not unlike the farm that featured in her first novel, That Summer at Hill Farm, but now lives in London with her husband and two children. The Day Before the Fire is her second novel.

To the casual outsider, Hill Farm is a rural idyll and the perfect retreat from urban life. Yet beneath the tranquil surface lie discontent, desire and death-watch beetles. 
 
Farmer Hayes loves the land - but hates farming. His neglected wife Isabel adores her three children, but is temperamentally unsuited to life as a wife and mother. The Smith sisters have not spoken to one another for forty years, farm-hand Mikey dabbles in pyromania, while neighbour Mr Payne has fled the city, only to find a greater threat to his karma in the hedgerows of Middle England. And after one incendiary summer, all of their lives will be different... 
 
Originally published with the title Hill Farm

Miranda France

A subtle and deeply satisfying book... if there is such a thing as an 'authentic' writer, then France certainly makes the grade

Employing scalpel-sharp prose, Miranda France delicately dissects a legacy of past hurts and probes the possibility for repair and restitution

France skilfully weaves together a believable, deftly characterised and scholarly tale that never lets its keen-eyed observations about London, the heritage and social class occlude an emerging story of Ros's necessary excavation of her own past

A fine eye for the telling detail... France is very good at capturing the ambiguities of the heritage industry

Intelligent, insightful, enlightening and gripping

M.L. Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans

Feisty and self-contained, the book's heroine has little time for the way the English "wallow in history". Yet, as she peels away the charred Pugin wallpaper, Ros is confronted with the palimpsest of her own past... a very modern period drama

A witty and uncomfortably accurate look at our obsession with the past

France skilfully weaves together a believable, deftly characterised and scholarly tale

'Intelligent, insightful, enlightening and gripping' ML Stedman, author of The Light Between Oceans 
 
When fire devastates Turney House, London’s finest stately home, the immaculate Lady Alexandra Marchant demands that everything be restored exactly as it was ‘the day before the fire’. Every charred remnant must be salvaged. Even the famous chandelier will be pieced back together into a flawless reconstruction. 
 
But is it possible, or even desirable, to resurrect the past? And why do we care so much about it? Critics say the restored Turney can never be more than an elegant fake; Lady Alexandra Marchant says Turney’s doors, its café and gift shop, must be re-opened to the paying public as soon as possible. 
 
Ros Freeman is called in as part of the effort, to Turney’s tented village of carvers, gilders, plasterers and stonemasons. Ros loves her work as a paper restorer. She considers herself an expert in uncovering the past, layer by layer, to bring out the truth. And yet in her personal life there are corners, shadows, ghosts, she fails to see. Until a discovery in Turney’s Rose Room challenges her to look again.

Miranda France

Praise for The Day Before the Fire

A subtle and deeply satisfying book... if there is such a thing as an 'authentic' writer, then France certainly makes the grade

Employing scalpel-sharp prose, Miranda France delicately dissects a legacy of past hurts and probes the possibility for repair and restitution

France skilfully weaves together a believable, deftly characterised and scholarly tale that never lets its keen-eyed observations about London, the heritage and social class occlude an emerging story of Ros's necess ...

A subtle and deeply satisfying book... if there is such a thing as an 'authentic' writer, then France certainly makes the grade

Employing scalpel-sharp prose, Miranda France delicately dissects a legacy of past hurts and probes the possibility for repair and restitution

France skilfully weaves together a believable, deftly characterised and scholarly tale that never lets its keen-eyed observations about London, the heritage and social class occlude an emerging story of Ros's necess ...

A subtle and deeply satisfying book... if there is such a thing as an 'authentic' writer, then France certainly makes the grade

Employing scalpel-sharp prose, Miranda France delicately dissects a legacy of past hurts and probes the possibility for repair and restitution

France skilfully weaves together a believable, deftly characterised and scholarly tale that never lets its keen-eyed observations about London, the heritage and social class occlude an emerging story of Ros's necess ...

Books by Miranda France

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter