Elmet is told by teenage Daniel, and details the events that happened when he, his sister and father built a house and made their home on someone else's land. I did get a little bored early on in the novel, the descriptions are rich and Daniel is meticulous about telling us in great detail about their day to day lives. Though beautifully written, it seemed often trivial, but having finished the book I realised this gets you invested in the family; without knowing how they live their lives, and the love between them, you cannot know what it is stake by the end of the book. That said, those readers who like to be hooked early on might not make it past the half way mark of this book. Those who appreciate stunning prose will enjoy this book, and the setting, so attentively depicted, is practically a main character in itself. The only thing that kept pulling me out of the story was thinking how eloquently Daniel, so sheltered and unworldly, tells his story. It doesn't quite fit character. There are themes of violence running through the novel, which can make it difficult to read – it definitely is not a quaint tale about life in the countryside. I would recommend it for anyone looking for a story that slowly takes hold of you and sticks with you long after reading.

Thank you to the author, the publishers and netgalley for the ARC.

I was looking forward reading Elmet by Fiona Mozley especially as it was Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017.
Sorry to say I hated it. I got to over half way through the book and I had to deleted it from my Kindle. I found this book boring and could not finish it. Sorry

As I was taking part in a Man Booker reading group I was grateful to have opportunity to review here,

Certainly an unusual tale with very evocative setting and strong characters. I read very quickly as I was so concerned about the events occurring and needed to know outcome. Although not my pivk for Prize found it intelligent and beautifully written novel,

This is a beautifully written book, lyrical and poetic with some incredible descriptions of the world inhabited by the three main characters. Daddy, Cathy and Daniel are outcasts - by their own choice - but together they're a strong, unbreakable and loving family unit.

Elmet is a gorgeous story, with 14-year-old Daniel's narrative synonymously weaving adolescent naivety with the natural purity of the natural world he describes. Though they live in a world imbued with darkness, Daniel's voice and observations lend the book a lightness and innocence that is both refreshing and poignant.

My only quibble is that some of the stylistic narrative wove its way into characters' speech, which made parts of the dialogue feel unnatural and too stylized. The poetic writing is perfect for capturing the atmosphere and setting of the book, but doesn't translate well into speech.

If I were to score the book purely on its prose I would have to give it five stars but I was puzzled with other elements of the book especially that only the three main characters were properly developed and also the ending was just too over the top.
Brilliant first novel though with so much promising a lot more to come.

I got an advance copy of this book from net galley. I had had it on my TBR for a while having heard great things about it. However I have struggled to rate it and hovered between 2 and 3 stars. Mozley writes in a great literary style but its like reading through a fog trying to understand what the storyline is and where it is going. In some places I felt like I had a handle on everything only for it to be gathered back into the mist. It is set about 20 miles from my home and I looked forward to reading something truly "Yorkshire" but apart from the "colloquial dialogue" the spirit of Yorkshire failed to come through. I often wish for a half star rating and this is one of those occasions, there were parts i enjoyed but it did not work as a whole

Beautiful., memorable - a modern classic. A slow and special read.

I wanted to like Elmet more than I actually did. I tried to care and the promise was there but I just got more and more disappointed as the narrative progressed, always feeling like there was an elusive something I was missing. Unfortunately I never found it and finished the book feeling underwhelmed and nonplussed. The whole thing seemed to me underdeveloped, even shallow. Ideas, themes, imagery - even the characters - all seemed unexplored and unfinished, making the narrative disjointed and at points downright boring. I did not feel like I knew, understood or liked any of the characters. Despite this being on a literary prize list I did not recognise it as anything out of the ordinary; in fact, it was decidedly average.

Just before his fourteenth birthday, Daniel/Danny about to turn fourteen and his sister Cathy, just turned fifteen, move with their father to a copse in a Yorkshire valley once part of the ancient kingdom of Elmet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmet) a land described in the Ted Hughes quote in the Epigraph as "Even into the seventeenth century this narrow cleft and its side-gunnells, under the glaciated moors were still a “badlands” a sanctuary for refugees from the law".

This ancient kingdom includes the Cragg Vale (the setting for The Gallows Pole a book tipped unsuccessfully for the Booker longlist and which was set in the close of the seventeenth century featuring a group of coiners, just as the law started to invade their sanctuary).

This is the debut novel of the author, a 28 year old studying for a PhD in the concept of decay in late-medieval towns and eco politics, a process she has described as complementary to writing this novel, a novel inspired by her researches. The novel’s creation came when she was travelling from her home town of York to London, observing the copses and outbuildings of the South Yorkshire landscape.

Led by their father, the tight family unit build by hand and from the trees of the ancient wood a simple house in what we understand is the old location of their long absent mother's family home – a land which still retains much of its sense of ancient isolation and a land able to be glimpsed from the London to Edinburgh mainline.

"And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched. Now pocked with clutches of trees, once the whole county had been woodland and the ghosts of the ancient forest could be marked when the wind blew. The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives. Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of gnarled timber. The calls of half-starved hounds rushing and panting as they snatched at charging quarry. Robyn Hode and his pack of scrawny vagrants, whistling and wrestling and feasting as freely as the birds whose plumes they stole. An ancient forest ran in a grand strip from north to south. Boars and bears and wolves. Does, harts, stags. Miles of underground fungi. Snowdrops, bluebells, primroses. The trees had long since given way to crops and pasture and roads and houses and railway tracks and little copses, like ours, were all that was left."

The story is narrated first person by Daniel looking back chronologically on the events that occurred after their move and breaking off to reflect in depth on earlier formative events in their family life. Within this detailed and simply but powerfully written account are interspersed brief present tense sections as Daniel searches for Cathy along the Edinburgh direction of the London train line which passed their copse.

Their giant father is a legendary and undefeated bareknuckle prize fighter. He is fiercely independent and determined to breed in his children while he still can the same independence and reliance on nothing other than your wits, physical strength, the natural resources of the ancient woods, and old ties of loyalty. He arranges for Vivien an old friend of their mother's to give some more formal education to the children.

"He wanted to be an honest man who shared what he knew with his children, imparting details of his current and former lives, knowing that if any of the details were too much for us that was the very reason for imparting them. Everything he did now was to toughen us up against something unseen. He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it. We had been taken out of our school and our hometown to live with Daddy in a small copse. We had no friends and hardly any neighbours. We obtained a form of education from a woman who dropped books lazily into our laps from a library she had developed to suit only her tastes and her own way of thinking. She probably resented our presence. She probably thought we were filthy and stupid but gave us her time out of some obligation to Daddy. "

Daniel and Cathy are fiercely loyal to each other and their father but very different: "I had an inside sort of head. She had an outside sort of head.". Further unlike their father who seems unable to escape a traditional masculine role of fists and brawn, both confound gender expectations.

Daniel, who others remark takes after his mother, effectively takes her role in their family unit, cleaning their house, cooking their meals, planting fruit trees and vegetables to supplement the meat their father poaches or trades in exchange for game or favours. He has long hair and nails and wears cropped t-shirts, styles he realises he has partly taken from his mother and partly from a lack of exposure to society’s conventions.

"You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. "

He also throws himself into the lessons with Vivien, becoming slightly obsessed with her and her life, perhaps as a way of trying to understand more of female life in the absence of a maternal figure.

Cathy (who bunks off the lessons to roam in the woods) although appearing physically slight has learnt from her father how to defend herself and shares his belief that the world around them is not just and that the only thing someone can rely on to defend themselves against it are immediate family, old friends and loyalties and ultimately the ability to fight. She is also driven by an inner anger.

"‘I think I were too angry to sleep,’ she said. Her statement shocked me. I asked her why she was angry. ‘I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?’ I told her that I was not. I told her that I was hardly ever angry and then she told me again that she felt angry all the time. She told me that sometimes she felt like she was breaking apart. She told me that sometimes it was as if she was standing with two feet on the ground but at the very same time part of her was running headlong into a roaring fire."

For the first fourteen years of Daniel's life the family live in a small house on the North Sea coast, originally with their Granny Morley until her death. A key formative event from which in Daniel's view so much else stems occurs when he is six and the eight year old Cathy snaps under the persistent bullying and abuses of three boys and fights back only for her to be in trouble at school as the teacher and headmistress simply refuse to believe her story against that of the "nice boys".

Daniel returns to the events many times

"I wondered if she thought about it too. Or if the boys did. Or if any of the other small people at the far reaches of my recollection spent the time that I had thinking about the bits in which they played a part. It seems to me that so much of everything came from this, and that if anyone thought about moments like this enough, the future would be done before it had even started, and I mean that in a good way. "

Events which seem to have triggered a complete change in Cathy's worldview

"As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’ ‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’ Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there. ‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’ "

And confirmed to their father that they could not rely on any outside help or sense of justice

"Later, Daddy told us that after he had heard the teacher’s comments on the conduct of the boys he saw that there would be no real use in responding with his true thoughts. Mrs Randell’s assessment was simply the way people saw things, he told us. It was the way the world was and we just had to find methods of our own to work against it and to strengthen ourselves however we could."

A key theme of the book is ancient concepts of property ownership and how they clash with modern capitalist concepts of landlords, an idea that would seem to be inspired by the author’s PhD research. In particular the family quickly clashes with the local landowner Mr Price.

"‘I dindt buy land,’ answered Daddy. ‘I dindt win it in a fight neither. As far as Price is concerned we don’t own it, not in the way he sees ownership, at any rate.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Your mother lived round here. When she fell on hard times, Price seized a lot of what she had. But when your Granny Morley died it seemed like the right place to come, to build a home, to live as a family. Because of your mother. And because I knew we would care for this land in a way Mr Price never could, and never would. Mr Price does nothing with these woods. He doendt work them. He doendt coppice them. He doendt know the trees. He doendt know the birds and animals that live here. Yet there is a piece of paper that says this land belongs to him.’ "

This clash widens when Danny’s father uses wider loyalties and an appeal to old working class solidarity (going back through the local mining unions to even earlier times) to turn it into a clash between the local workers and the farmers/landowners, a clash which over time culminates in violence and lead to Danny’s quest for his sister.

One of the book’s strengths, is the way in which Danny and others realise that the clash between old and new is not simply one between good and evil and also is appealing to a misplaced sense of history.

"I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse."

"‘It wasn’t all that wonderful, all the time. Those men who would come together so naturally to support one another would go home drunk and beat their wives.’ Ewart was caught for a moment. Vivien continued, ‘There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams. "

Overall I found this a powerful read, a strong piece of writing for the debut novel of a young writer and one which conveys the sense of a community left behind while (as noted above) examining contemporary questions of gender roles, property rights and inequality in a nuanced way.

My main hesitation is around the narrative climax of the confrontation with Price which I did not find entirely believable. However Danny’s unresolved quest for Cathy added an extra layer of complexity to this part of the novel.

Nevertheless this almost unknown book was for me a welcome edition to a Booker longlist dominated by prize winning and widely reviewed authors and works.

It feels bewildering putting a book down, having spent over three-hundred pages in a world of characters that still feel like strangers to you. Elmet turned out to be that kind of novel for me - never quite gripping me.

Elmet is the story of a family. The former bare-knuckle fighter who is always called "Daddy" in this builds a home for himself and his two children, Cathy and Danny, up in Yorkshire, in a hidden copse on land that isn't his. There they live a simple life away from civilisation, hunting and growing their own food. Sounds idyllic, but darkness lingers. The self-chosen outsiders are circled by landowners and employers who set the story up for tragedy.

The fact that this novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize sparked my interest and I can see why it would gain the attention of literary critics. The language is simple and still poetic and vivid, with descriptions of the natural world that reminded me of John Steinbeck's world sometimes. (The question of how a fourteen year-old boy whose social and intellectual life is limited to spending time with his sister and father has gotten hold of that kind of vocabulary remains a mystery...)

All those heavy descriptions and worn words made me feel disconnected to the characters, however. They seemed to flat, too black-and-white for my liking. And for a story that is slow in pace and richer in backstory than in plot, this ultimately lead to a reading experience that dragged on.

So while I consider Fiona Mozley as a skilled writer, for whose future work I will be looking out for, this novel felt short for me on characters who I wasn't able to engage with and just a story that makes me want to gain more from. I guess this just wasn't for me.

5 stars for this novel, a stunning debut by Man Booker Prize-nominated author Fiona Mozley.

I finished this book several days ago but it has not finished with me: Elmet is lodged deep in my head, driven there perhaps by the quiet force of the narrative. The writing is incredible, with a lyricism that is stripped right down. Daniel, a boy on the cusp of manhood, tells us about his family and about their life in a house that he has helped Daddy and his sister Cathy to build in the middle of a copse on farm land they do not own. They have built stability from chaos and tragedy: an absent mother; the death of their grandmother. There is real love and a tenderness between Daddy, Cathy and Daniel, expressed in subtle, silent ways. What makes Daniel’s eloquence and passion flow is observing and recording, for example in his descriptions of scenes and colours that mean much to him: Cathy’s hair is ‘black as Whitby jet’, and charred wood is ‘a kind of black that was new to me, condensed, compacted, opaque’. Whereas Daniel’s father and sister are unflinchingly, violently proactive, he is the observer, the passive one – but his passivity is not the same as their friend Vivien’s, who says: ‘I don’t really care about anything’. Daniel cares.

The family’s stability is short-lived. The local land-owner, Price (and of course his naming is no accident, just as the name Cathy for a wild and tragic young woman on the Yorkshire moors can be no accident) will not allow the family to remain on his land unless on his terms. Price and his sons circle ever closer. The violence in the book builds horribly and inevitably.

Daddy reminds me of a hero in a Western, a man of tough integrity carving out a place for his family, opposed by men who have no feel for the land but who hold power. Daddy has power of a different sort but uses it scrupulously according to his moral code. He finds land-ownership incomprehensible, the ‘idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper’. Well, quite, says this farm-worker’s daughter in Scotland, a country with hugely inequitable land ownership, where over half the land is owned by perhaps 432 people…

This novel is rooted in place, as its name informs us. It is also a story of family and community, capitalism and inequality, love, power, and violence. And the telling of the story is beautiful – I look forward to reading more by Fiona Mozley.

I received this ebook free from NetGalley in return for an honest review. I have checked all quotes against the published version of the book. UK publication: 10 August 2017 by JM Originals.

I found this book quite challenging to read. It's beautifully written, especially in description, some of the passages were wonderful and I found myself lingering over them and trying to absorb every word. This makes for quite a slow moving narrative and I did struggle to decide when this book was taking place, which meant it took me a while to read it and to actually decide if I liked the book.
As the story unfolded I initially felt sure that the book was set in a dystopian future but, this gradually switched to a realisation that the family are living now but they are off-grid, part of a particular subculture which means they keep away from the wider population and towns and cities. This was quite surprising and changed the way I thought about the book, it actually made it more thought provoking and more interesting to me.,
14 year old Daniel is our narrator and we see the events of the book through his eyes. At times I found myself questioning the authenticity of his voice. He seems to bounce around between a bit young for his age (which can be explained by the lifestyle they lead), and occasionally almost adult in his views. I actually think his Sister Kathy was the more interesting character and I would have liked to have seen through her experiences more.
As a debut novel this is a very accomplished book which really deserved the inclusion on the Booker shortlist, it is lyrical and atmospheric and I would read more by her.

It takes a very special book to force me to take a break from reading and pause to reflect. Elmet is the first book I have read in a long time that held such power that I couldn't bring myself to immediately pick up and start another book. I loved every minute of reading this. I found myself racing through it yet wishing it didn't have to end at the same time.

I am not sure what I expected when I first picked this book up. I knew it had been listed for the Man Booker prize, that Fiona Mozley was studying a PhD in medieval history and that the title 'Elmet' presumably came from the historical area of Britain of that name. I sort of put those things together and anticipated a pretentious or challenging read in all the wrong ways. I could not have been more wrong. This book was accessible, fast paced, utterly engrossing and by some distance the best book I have read in the last two years.

The style of the book allows for pace with depth and the story unwinds and unfolds in such a way as to build suspense and mystery without the story feeling at home in either of those genres. The characters here are fascinating in their own unique ways and this allows for the book to challenge its reader in all the right ways. Without any pretentious or flowery language a compelling character study is built which could be used to study differing social norms across gender, sexuality and class structures across modern day Britain. I never expected this book to leave me so shocked and completely in awe of it.

Beyond outstanding and worthy of any praise it receives. This is a must read.

I got cross with this book. Had started it because I loved a film called “Captain Fantastic”. There, too, a father lives with his children in the wilderness at the very fringe of society and they have to confront the “normal world”. But here, I got impatient with the long descriptions of mundane tasks like cooking a lamb chop, the little stories Daddy tells his children that somehow don’t seem to hang together and trivial events of the past the boy narrator seems to dwell on. The family’s self-sufficiency was less than convincing and the side story about the boy Daniel searching for his sister may well have been omitted since it did not add anything to the main story, nor was it ever resolved. Disappointed. The three stars were for the very atmospheric landscape descriptions.

Really brilliant. The pace and tone was just perfect and so different from anything else I’ve ever read.

Daniel, the narrator, and Cathy, his older sister live with their father in remotest Yorkshire. Their existence is primitive; their home basic, and hewn from their own hands. The story revolves around the trio’s life away from the input of others - alongside the dangers of land owner Mr Price’s control and threats.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ with its apocalyptic feel. Its themes are raw and harsh; the landscape unforgiving. But they battle through, leading a lifestyle far removed from that of so many others. The novel’s denouement is violent and tragic, in so many ways. Daniel, so innocent and needy, shows determination through the final section, leaving the reader needing and wanting more. This is well-deserved as a ManBooker shortlist title and I look forward to reading more of Fiona Mozley’s work.

An interesting and engrossing read. An unusual subject.

Fiona Mozley's debut novel Elmet was controversially shortlisted for the 2017 Booker Prize above a host of more established names. Having read 9 of the 13 longlisted novels, I think it thoroughly deserved its place on the shortlist, although I'm not surprised that it wasn't selected as the overall winner (simply because George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo is just so good). Daniel, who narrates the novel, and his sister, Cathy - a name which deliberately recalls Wuthering Heights - have had a simple if unusual childhood. Under the watchful eye of their Daddy, they've grown up in a house in the middle of a Yorkshire forest, learning to fend for themselves by making furniture, catching game with handmade bows and arrows, and growing their own vegetables. Daddy is an ex-boxer, a once-famous man on the underground fighting circuit, now retired after the disappearance of his wife. However, Daddy's strength of mind and body is still respected in the local community, and when he becomes involved in a local dispute about rent and wages, Daniel and Cathy's peaceful existence is threatened.

Elmet, despite having little obvious plot for its first two-thirds, is a mesmerising read which becomes difficult to put down once you race into its final chapters. Much has been written about Mozley's eye for landscape, but it was the characterisation that gripped me. Daniel, our narrator, is perhaps the least interesting of the trio who occupy the heart of the novel. A 'girly' boy who only very slowly realises that boys aren't meant to have long hair or wear shirts that show off their midriffs, his struggles with masculinity are fundamentally blunted by the protection from the hostile world offered by Daddy and by 'Daddy's friend', Vivian, who offers him scrappy education and a cozy home to retreat to for a few hours. What was interesting to me about Daniel wasn't his confusion about gender - which I didn't find especially original, as it's been handled more interestingly in novels like Sara Taylor's The Lauras - but the way in which his ultra-masculine Daddy seemingly accepts his feminine son unquestioningly. It would have been so easy to make this into yet another novel where a violent father tries to force a son into his own ideas of manhood. Instead, Mozley sets up a much more interesting scenario, creating a Daddy who, like Daniel, we passionately want to believe in - even if, by the end of the novel, we're questioning whether we still can.

Cathy, like Daddy, is an absolute triumph of a character. Again, she could easily have slipped into the cliche of a wild tomboy girl, but she's too firmly embedded in her own individuality. The vivid monologues that Mozley writes for a number of her characters are one of the most memorable aspects of Elmet, and Cathy gets all the best lines. She's viciously angry about womanhood. After meeting Vivian, she tells Daniel, in prose that distantly recalls the prose-poetry of Eimear MacBride's A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing:

'Hers is the most horrible body I've ever seen... It's her hips. She's not even fat. There's no extra weight on her, but her hip bones are so large and wide that she can't move without considering them... God, it's disgusting. Can you imagine running with hips like that?... Muscles on your thighs being twisted as you're trying to run away and your knees trying to support those hips and your running thighs while trying to keep them in line with your feet. All of you trying to go forwards and bloody bones are holding you back. Jesus fucking Christ, I'd rather die.'

Cathy's concern with being able to run away becomes more and more obvious when we find out about the sexualised assaults she's already experienced, and the fear she feels when she hears about other women being raped and murdered. However, it's also an account of the pain of female puberty under patriarchy that is rarely heard in fiction; the sense that you are becoming something that you so passionately don't want to be, one of the 'women' who are assaulted and judged, oppressed and shamed. As Cathy says late in the novel:

'Sometimes I can't stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can't stop thinking about how I'm turning into one of them. I'm older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I dindt want to end up in a ditch... We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine.'

Elmet is an interesting novel that would probably have slipped by unnoticed if not for the Booker - It was Evocative, subtle, and poetic. I was particularly captivated by the fact that the narrative is so controlled - it approaches many things, yet subtly retreats while leaving a haunting impression of what is left unwritten. This Book will stay with me for a long time.

Visceral, inventive and utterly compelling this dark tale of survival, love and revenge in the mythical land of Elmet (modern West Yorkshire) is a brilliant debut. The ending is drawn-out and so harrowing I nearly couldn't read it, but I still had to stay up late to finish it!