Daisy Hildyard

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald.

It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of England, with characters who stick like burrs to the imagination.

A remarkable debut... it's an expansive and ambitious book that has echoes of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.

Daisy Hilyard's skill has been to weave all the disparate elements into a seamlessly structured and utterly absorbing investigation of our relationship with the past.

Ms Hilyard's wit, along with her polish, send a promising signal for the future.

Cleverly deploying all the conventions of non-fiction.

As Hildyard's story unfolds, the lives of ordinary parents, grandparents and great-grandparents become as pertinent, captivating and touching as any official history of England could be.

An ambitious, almost impossibly wide-ranging book... Where the novel is most original is in tone. If a good writer is someone who matches style to subject, this novel is very prosing indeed.

Hunters in the Snow is a very assured assemblage held together by the questions of narrative, integration, and preservation which run through it.

Like history itself, the meaning may remain doubtful; but we relish captivating stories.

Fine and wonderfully original debut novel.

A hauntingly brilliant first novel about how we respond to the past... I envied, as well as admired, this author's literary command. A star is born.

One of the year’s most impressive first novels…Hunters in the Snow’s ambition, scope and assurance…are thrilling and admirable, and make for a very fine book indeed.

After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather’s farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916. 
 
These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too – about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian’s own. 
 
Hunters in the Snow marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer.

Daisy Hildyard

Praise for Hunters in the Snow

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald.

A remarkably intelligent debut

It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of Englan ...

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald.

A remarkably intelligent debut

It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of Englan ...

Hunters in the Snow is a brilliant debut. Its investigations into the individual's relationship to history call to mind the best of Sebald.

A remarkably intelligent debut

It draws you in, lights up dark corners playfully, supposes all kinds of things about how we remember, record or forget. It's also very located. The bass line, so to speak, is a very particular part of Englan ...

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