Marie-Elsa Bragg

A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so the tragedy of what happens is all the more heartbreaking.

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes – but has written an impassioned elegy for a way of life that has come into head-on collision with the modern world

A literary force... In so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view

Toward Mellbreak tells the story of struggling Cumbrian fell farmers, with a blunt lyrical richness that is resonant of Ted Hughes

A lyrical and compelling generational story of Cumbrian hill farmers that wears its spiritual seriousness of purpose lightly but oh so movingly

Savagely elegant… If Thomas Hardy had ventured to historic Cumberland, this is the tenor of the tale that he would have written… Bragg writes with cinematic poetry: in empathetic close-up to her few characters, in wide-angled landscape illumination of the fell&shy;scapes that both liberate and contain them. The world that she conjures so deftly is a world away from the visitors’ Lake District… Sometimes in clipped sentences like gasped breath, sometimes by unfurling parables of light over landscapes, Bragg recreates an extra&shy;ordinary, often disregarded world, uniting farm and fell, work and prayer, suffering and redemption in new and powerful ways

This is a book which stayed with me well after I finished it… A very thoughtful book with plenty to mull over

A closely observed rural family chronicle, a fierce indictment of the ignorant authoritarianism of government agencies in recent decades promoting untried, environmentally disastrous and lethally poisonous pesticides in the countryside, and an understated but strong celebration of spiritual discovery and resilience

After many generations, it is now Harold who runs Ard Farm. Out on the fells, he feels his father’s presence, and there is hope that he, his grandmother and his Uncle Joe will be able to take the farm forward and prosper. But their way of life is under threat: farming is undergoing huge change and increasingly harmful intervention. 
 
Towards Mellbreak is a hymn both to the landscape of Cumbria and to a disappearing world. Poetic, beautiful and tragic, it exposes the struggle to preserve traditions and beliefs in the face of change, and an assertion of the power to be found in the rituals we pass down through our families.

Marie-Elsa Bragg

Praise for Towards Mellbreak

A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so t ...

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes ...

A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so t ...

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes ...

A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so t ...

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes ...

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