With foot and mouth disease spreading across the hills of Cumbria, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke, two neighbouring shepherds lose everything and put aside their rivalry to join forces. They set their sights on a wealthy farm in the south with its flock of prizewinning animals. So begins the dark tale of Steve Elliman and William Herne.  

This is not a tale for the faint-hearted. The culling and disposal of animals is never a happy subject. Having lived through the time and watching horrific scenes of giant burning pyres every night on tv was distressing for us, the viewers, but it must have been devastating for the farmers. This tale doesn’t hold back. Having said that it’s very cleverly written. Well-paced, once you get used to the language, and the characters are very real. Gory and raw but terrifically entertaining.

An immersive, raw tale of sheep farmers in Cumbria whe foot and mouth struck. Highly original and lyrically written, humour, hardship and raw need abound.

A sheep farm, settled in Cumbria when I read this description I wanted to read this book. But I find difficult review this book, because is well written got a interesting structure and I Belive the premise of the whole plot is very interesting. It does remind me a little bit of the writing of Cormac MCCartney. This is a very different and very vibrant book. For me the whole book was very enjoyable and difficult to read on parts and the plot end up being to flat by the ending of the book. But I still think we gonna see this book winning some prizes this 2024

This one wasn't for me, but I can see it faring well and perhaps even loved well by other readers. The execution of the novel didn't interest me as much as the idea of the novel itself. One thing I would say is that I love the use of northern accents in the writing. I hope to see this in more novels instead of the usual, sterilised tone in most books. I wonder if this is an editorial decision instead of an authorial one. Either ways, warms my heart reading it. Unfortunately something about the plot structure didn't carry me along far. Even though it didn't move me much, or impressed me enough, I am still excited to read the future writing and work of this writer.

It’s really great to see a novel set in Cumbria, using Cumbrian dialect, and giving an unvarnished picture of a part of the country that is often reduced to chocolate box images of the Lakes. I enjoyed the Western elements transplanted to the fells too, though I felt some of the pacing was off. Would love to read more by him in future though.

Brilliant: bleak, funny and beautifully written. It's refreshing to read something so original.

Full review on publication.

A visceral, wind-shorn, scathing immersion into the realities of making a living as a sheep farmer when foot & mouth disease reared its raw-mouthed head. The language is evocative, a grimace on the page, and resonant of the landscape and hardscrabble life it describes. It’s the fictional equivalent of Bella Bathurst’s Field Work (also excellent), and shares the same focus on what working on the land does to people.

The publisher bills this Foot and Mouth inspired, Cumbrian hill-farm set novel as a neo-Western thriller with echoes of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx.

While not disagreeing I would provide two further and for me more pertinent comparisons:

Jean Baptiste Del Amo’s 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize winning “Animalia” with its earthy, visceral and brutal tale of farming but with Cumbrian sheep replacing French pigs;

And a cross Irish Sea transplantation of the genre of novels I have christened Craic Cocaine (think Lisa McInerney’s Cork City trilogy, Luke Cassidy’s “Iron Annie” or Colin Barrett’s 2024 debut novel “Wild Houses”) – literary fiction, written with a mixture of crackling dialogue (here perhaps more of the powerfully sparse and dry variety), great description (a favourite here was “Riding aside great bare fields with birches praying to winter and the lines stripped to mud by tractors”) , black humour and violence, billed as about the Irish working classes but often more straying into criminal (and particularly drug dealing) territory.

The book’s first party protagonist is Steve (Elliman), son of a Cumbrian Hill Farmer and the book, is written looking back on the time in early spring 2011 when Foot and Mouth ravaged the sheep farms of the area (and wider) leading to mass culls and burnings of the flocks by the MAFF (Mininsrty of Agriculture, Farming and Fishing – the predecessor to DEFRA), with squaddies and the local police (here lead by a copper known as Big Red).

Just as an aside I was impressed with how convincingly the retrospective view is was done, we are not given the usual ridiculously excessive, apparently recalled detail but instead what still strikes Steve some decades later. So that a crucial confrontation takes place on “the day of an big English match. I can’t remember which, but we lost if that narrows it down” , a flash new car bought with some crime proceeds is “an off roader, another Land Rover from what I remember”.

When early in the book Steve’s Father’s Flock is clumsily and bloodily executed, Steve takes the one remaining ram, and visits the neighbouring larger farm of William Herne (who is supposedly to blame for the outbreak). There he is quickly drawn in to assisting William with hiding some of his flock on a mountain plateau (partly drawn by a near lifelong attraction to William’s fiercely independent wife Helen) but leaves for the South when that plot quickly fails (due to Big Red discovering the sheep).

Returning to Cumbria after his father’s death he is drawn back into William’s orbit, and sharing tales of a rather psychopathic sheep rustler and on-the-spot butcher he met while driving lorries, seems to confirm William’s decision to move into more criminal activities. These start with a large scale raid on a Southern farm to steal a whole flock of prize sheep, but quickly descend into hosting a drug dealing gang and participating in an attempt to steal cash from a rival gang; the plot itself descending into violence.

If I had a criticism of the book’s structure it is that we only meet William after Foot and Mouth. We are I believe meant to see him as drawn to violence and crime, by the violence done to their flocks and their lack of any other economic prospect: but not knowing much (or anything) of his previous life did not really give me any impression of a change in attitude so that I did not feel the requisite sympathy with their attitudes.

Steve is a more rounded character – as a narrator we get more insight into his backstory and also revisit him later in life from when he is narrating the book, and through him we get a really strong insight into a hard working farming mentality.

Overall this is a very different and striking book – and while the violence and criminality were too dominant for it to be to my personal taste, I would not be surprised to see it on book and prize lists on publication in 2024.

My thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC via NetGalley

Ideal for readers who like literary character studies that explore a topic little covered in fiction, in this case the effect of foot and mouth disease on a Cumbrian sheep farmer. The writer ably captures the voice of his protagonist.
With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.

Scott Preston's debut novel, The Borrowed Hills, arrives razor-sharp, a brutal tale of foot and mouth disease in Cumbria and the lengths some farmers go to make a living in those beautiful hills. It's language is rich, evocative of Cormac McCarthy and Faulkner at times, but cut through with Cumbrian grit.

William Herne and Steve Elliman, two local farmers, seek to reverse their fortunes by rustling livestock from the south. It is an unusual tale, its plot description sounding like something from 19th Century frontier America, but this is the story of desolate, burnt farms, dimly lit service stations and rural life in the modern age.

This is a startlingly brilliant debut, one which gripped me on every page. For me it's sure to be one of the highlights of 2024.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston.

As foot and mouth disease spreads across the hills of Cumbria, emptying the valleys of sheep and filling the skies with smoke, Steve Elliman and William Herne, two neighbouring farmers, join forces to reverse their fortunes by rustling livestock from the south.

As someone who used to Holliday in the area at that time and now live here , and also having farming friends , for many ,
that awful time has ever left them .

Having all your stock taken away to be culled ( real word - killed ) because a farm in the same valley as you had it is devastating , more so when you have spent decades building up the breed .

A harrowing read but a lifelike interruption of life for many farming families and the greater community.