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Winner of the MsLexia Prize, a beautiful novel about a woman´s struggle with isolation and sanity woven with the story of the poet W. H. Auden

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´Mysterious, wondrous, captivating´ Louis de Bernieres

´We need the courage to choose ourselves´ W. H. Auden

It´s early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she´s excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.

Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears.

The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Echoing the depths of Possession, the elegance of The Stranger´s Child and the ingenuity of Longbourn, Larchfield is a beautiful and haunting novel about heroism - the unusual bravery that allows unusual people to go on living; to transcend banality and suffering with the power of their imagination.

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Magical and transcendent . . . I suspect that few debuts in 2017 will match the elegance of Larchfield. This is a beautiful novel: passionate, lyrical and surprising. I will remember Larchfield for a long time. John Boyne Irish Times

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Clark, Polly
Polly Clark was born in Toronto and divides her time between Helensburgh on Scotland´s west coast and a houseboat in London. Her poetry collections have between them won the Eric Gregory Award and been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Michael Marks Awards. Her first novel Larchfield won the MsLexia Novel Prize and was published in 2017 to critical acclaim. She has worked as a zookeeper at Edinburgh Zoo, where her fascination with Siberian tigers began. For Tiger she undertook a research trip to the remote Russian taiga, where, in the depths of the Siberian winter, at temperatures of -35C, she learned how to track wild tigers.

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