Clay

By: Melissa Harrison

Narrated by: Sarah Durham

Bloomsbury presents Clay by Melissa Harrison, read by Sarah Durham.

Eight-year-old TC skips school to explore the city’s overgrown, forgotten corners. Sophia, seventy-eight, watches with concern as he slips past her window, through the little park she loves. She’s writing to her granddaughter, Daisy, whose privileged upbringing means she exists in a different world from TC – though the two children live less than a mile apart.

Jozef spends his days doing house clearances, his nights working in a takeaway. He can’t forget the farm he left behind in Poland, its woods and fields still a part of him, although he is a thousand miles away. When he meets TC he finds a kindred spirit: both lonely, both looking for something, both lost.©2013 Melissa Harrison (P)2022 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic reviews

"A gently-evoked urban tragedy - and the most powerful and original debut novel I’ve read for years." (A N Wilson, Readers Digest)

"Clay moves to rhythms that we associate less with fiction than with the close-descriptive style of nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane.... At the heart of Clay is a hymn to attentiveness, both to the natural world and to those we share it with." (Financial Times)

"Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone." (Robert Macfarlane)