'themes of persecution, punishment and the exploitation of the weak' The GuardianThis extraordinary, evocative novel boils over with the terrors of childhood and won the Somerset Maugham Award.
‘I didn’t want you to come here.’ So says the note that the boy Edmund Hooper passes to Charles Kingshaw when he arrives with his mother to live at the Hooper's isolated country house, Warings. To Hooper, Kingshaw is an intruder, a boy to be subtly persecuted, and Kingshaw finds that even the most ordinary object can be turned by Hooper into a source of terror. Kingshaw knows Hooper will never let him be. Kingshaw cannot win, not in the last resort. He knows it, and so does Hooper. And the worst is still to come…
Susan Hill writes: "I went to stay in a remote farm cottage behind a wood in the summer of 1968 to write another book. While I was there, the farmer’s grandson and a friend were staying and often came by my cottage chatting and sometimes fighting – and the story emerged from there, though the real boys were not at all like Hooper and Kingshaw. The episode of the Crow really happened - to me, Hang Wood really existed, the farm and the village and Warings were all as I described them.
The book has had an extraordinary impact – some adults cannot take it because they do not believe young boys can behave in this way but plenty of young people have told me that this sort of cruelty and unkindness is common - it’s what we call bullying and it goes on more and more, of course. Although I wrote it as an adult novel, as a result of being set for GCSE for many years it has become one that young people read and usually find a lot in it to think about and discuss. "
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