The Giant on the Skyline

On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go

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What is it that makes a home? What is a home without the roots that tie you to a place? What is a home when a family is split?

Clover's eldest children are leaving home for university. Her husband Pete's work is in America. The only way for Clover and the younger children to live with him is to uproot, leave their rural life near the ancient Ridgeway in Oxfordshire and move to Washington DC. Forced to leave the home she loves and consider these questions, Clover sets out to explore the place where she lives, walk the Ridgway, understand a little of the history of her landscape and work out why it is that it is so hard for her to go. In doing so she paints a beautifully layered portrait of family, community and of belonging in a landscape that has drawn people to it for generation after generation.

A deeply felt meditation on home, belonging, place and memory … Restless, questing, The Giant on the Skyline is a travel book about wanting to stay put: a pilgrimage through a fabled English landscape … Stroud’s best memoir yet, the most invigoratingly expansive, strikingly written. Moving … Transformative.
Patricia Nichol, Daily Mail

Perhaps more than any other writer, Stroud has taken the elegant, elliptical memoir and forged it into the genre of life writing … In the Giant on the Skyline, Stroud has produced something exceptional: a mystical meditatation on what home means and what constitutes belonging … It is magical and haunting and profoundly moving. Stroud is exceptionally evocative when writing about nature and family … even grungy Wantage with its Greggs and charity shops sounds alluring the way Stroud describes it.
Flora Watkins, Spectator

Stroud’s writing is assured, visceral, sexy as well as sensuous, richly coloured in every way, and often freshly poetic, whether dealing with a toddler’s tears over the broccoli touching the gravy, or with death and loss. She paints her way through the book with striking word pictures … Orgasmic time, druids, gentle giants… The reader swirls like a leaf on a stream, coming out amazed by the richness – and unknownness – of other people’s lives.
Philippa Stockley, The Oldie

Clover Stroud is expert at bringing her reader right to the heart of her longing. Her writing is intimate and warm, honest and generous. A true memoirist, she looks to people and place as her canvas, in this case the psychic and physical hold of the landscape and what we call home. The Giant on the Skyline is timeless and yet firmly rooted in time, magical and mysterious and yet earthy and sensual. It is full of personality, humour and heart and I did not want it to end.
Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father

Clover has turned her truth-seeing gaze on a tiny corner of the English landscape. This book is drenched in some of the most brilliant writing about place I’ve read in a long while. It’s as evocative as Laurie Lee, chalked up with Clover’s incisive, poetic encounters with magic, pain and belonging. A beautiful book, written in lyrical, liquid prose that seems to flow straight from the heart to the page.
Sophy Roberts, author of Lost Pianos of Siberia

About Clover Stroud

Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist; she has written for national media since she was twenty-five, and her Substack, ‘The Way Life Feels’, is a bestseller. Her first book, The Wild Other, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. Her critically acclaimed second book, My Wild and Sleepless Nights: A Mother’s Story, and third book, The Red of My Blood: A Death and Life Story, were instant Sunday Times bestsellers and rated ‘best books of the year’. Her fourth, A Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go (‘Stroud’s best memoir yet’, Daily Mail) described the year before she and three of her five children joined her husband in Washington DC. She and her family are now back in Oxfordshire.

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