Howards End is on the Landing

A year of reading from home

Susan Hill

ISBN 1846682657

ISBN 13 9781846682650

October 2009

Price £12.99

Hardback, 240 pp.

Buy this book at amazon.co.uk

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Subject: Memoir

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again.

A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill’s eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. Considering everything from Macbeth and Tristram Shandy through Virginia Woolf, Dickens and Roald Dahl, Howards End is on the Landing charts the journey of one of the nation’s most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

‘Delightful... an idiosyncratic commingling of fiction, non-fiction and poetry...Hill has a voracious and varied appetite and her taste, with a few exceptions, is impeccable’
— Leo Robson, New Statesman

‘A totally beguiling, utterly persuasive, argument for reimmersing yourself in literature’s past... it reminds you of the overlooked treasures we miss in the chase for novelty. Hill’s work is part memoir, part outpouring of affection for these she has loved and, en route, she provides us with a reading list the equal of any degree course’
— Michael Gove, The Times