'Clever, brave and urgent. I thought about Lost Property for days after I finished it.' Sarah Moss, author of Ghost WallFascinating and eloquent discussion of nationalism, art and conflict, leavened with wry humour. - Mail on Sunday____________________In the middle of her life, a writer finds herself in a dark wood, despairing at how modern Britain has become a place of such greed and indifference. In an attempt to understand her country and her species, she and her lover rent a busted-out van and journey through France and down to the Mediterranean, across Italy and the Balkans, finishing in Greece and its islands. Along the way, they drive through the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War, the Italian Renaissance, the 1990s and on to the current refugee crisis, encountering the shades of history, sometimes figuratively and sometimes - such as Joan of Arc, sitting pertly in the back of the van - quite...

Pollard tells the story of Anne, a bag lady, seen in the town as one of the older ones from ‘la la land’. Long ago, when she was fifteen, she ran away and made her life alone in the woods. It is her narrative that the reader hears, as Anne survives her first winter. She makes a shelter with her own hands, and decorates it; she forages for things to eat, experiences the pangs of love, watches the foxes and the deer and the changing seasons as the years go by. And in the wood there are other voices: the forest itself, the night, a man with a gun, boys splashing in pools…and the sound of distant chain-saws, heralding footpaths under the trees and walkways in the canopy. Laura Beatty has a gift for empathy and for challenging the reader. This is writing of the highest calibre.