'Witty, tender, ultimately terrifying … a celebration of love's persistence, a summoning of ancient lore, a superb debut.' — Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Carwyn and Rhian keep sheep in the mountains of Eryri, pushed year by year beyond what the work can bear. Something is buried in those hills, older than the farm and older than the language spoken on it, and as the economics of their life close in, what lies beneath the ground begins to make itself felt above it.

Higginson refuses to let the reader separate the two pressures: the bank and the barrow, the price of lambs and the thing in the grove become, by the end, the same story. Drawing on a living mythology and a living language, this is folk horror of unusual intelligence — a dark meditation on ageing, obsolescence and the march of progress — and a love story about two people holding on to each other as their world gives way.

Folk horror travels because every country has its own buried past and its own emptying countryside. The novel was reprinted within a month of publication, and French Rights have already been sold.