Sun Country
Writing My Way Home
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:4th Jun '26
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 4th June, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
'One of Britain's most distinctive and trustworthy voices ... A beautiful book' TIM WINTON
'A book to lose yourself inside, and emerge from with enhanced clarity and wisdom' FRANCES WILSON
'Tender and unflinching ... A masterclass in clarity and feeling' JIM CRACE
'Cunnell writes with so much sensitivity to the sacredness of the everyday' SARA BAUME
A beautifully written, courageous and deeply moving journey from sorrow to acceptance, from loss to hope, shimmering with coastal light and hard-won wisdom.
In Sun Country, Howard Cunnell returns to the southern England beachlands of his boyhood after the death of his mother.
A love letter to the changing coast and sea, Sun Country is a book alive with light and shadow, where the white spaces between words are as charged with tension and power as the words themselves. It is a reckoning with the things we inherit – silence and absence, stories told and untold – and the transgression involved in turning a life into art. At the heart of the book is Gillian, his devoted single mother, and the small yet unforgettable details of her life that are woven into a powerful meditation on impermanence, grief, class and solitude.
At once intimate and expansive, this luminous memoir traces one man’s journey from loss back towards life. Through stories about the writers and painters with whom he feels a kinship – including the English Romantics, W. H. Hudson and Agnes Martin – and the history of his own Sussex working-class family, Cunnell writes his way home to a place, to a culture and to himself as an artist.
Cunnell’s descriptive power, so widely praised in his first memoir, reaches a new breathtaking level, with the simplicity that only comes from the finest craft and poetry.
Quietly and modestly, Howard Cunnell has established himself as one of Britain’s most distinctive and trustworthy voices and with his latest memoir he’s taken another step clear of the pack. Sun Country is a bracing swim through a sea of grief and bewilderment. Few write as well about origins and fealty and fewer still offer such a vision of bruised and dogged love. This is a beautiful book. -- TIM WINTON, award-winning author of Cloudstreet
Bold, beautiful and entirely unique, Sun Country is less a memoir than a concentration on the present at a moment of turbulence. It is a book to lose yourself inside, and emerge from with enhanced clarity and wisdom -- FRANCES WILSON, Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted author of Electric Spark
Sun Country is a book rich with ghosts, and tender with loss and a search for home. It's told in exquisitely-crafted prose, the sentences honed to a fine point. Beautiful, rigorous work -- KERRY ANDREW, composer and author of We Are Together Because
A beautiful, bittersweet book. Sun Country weaves together stories from the distant and recent past, of ancestors and family, strangers and friends. A book about the circling nature of time, and the ever-presence of the past, Cunnell writes with so much sensitivity to the poignancy and sacredness of the everyday, describing ostensibly unremarkable moments with such precision they transform into deeply moving, meaningful scenes -- SARA BAUME, author of Seven Steeples
A profound personal meditation on time, place, love and loss that is also a valuable history of the struggle of all working class people to reach beyond the confinements of poverty and the limits of opportunity to create art of timeless wisdom and enduring beauty. Battleworn he may be, but Cunnell remains a soul survivor -- CATHI UNSWORTH, author of Season of the Witch
A memory quest that travels bravely, swims deep, hangs out, scavenges. Floats free, with tide and against. And brings the bounty home. To the heart. -- IAIN SINCLAIR, author of PARIAH GENIUS
Tender and unflinching, vulnerable and wise, intimate and boundless. A masterclass in clarity and feeling -- JIM CRACE, author of Harvest
Profound, illuminating and inspiring, Sun Country – the pun on the first word is clear – takes us on a watery journey through swimmer Howard Cunnell's Everyman existence, both archetypal and utterly unique, in this beautiful story of his soul's growth: how he came to be the master-writer he is today. Books - and water – lie at the heart of his magical words in this life-changing love story with his family. Unputdownable -- CHRIS SALEWICZ, author of Redemption Song
ISBN: 9781526691606
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 25mm
Weight: unknown
320 pages