Alan Garner and the work of time

This critical volume explores and reassesses Alan Garner’s significance as a writer, from mythic fantasy to landscape, memory, folklore, and the power of story. -- .

Alan Garner has been described by Philip Pullman as ‘the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien’. This book is the first collected edition to critically analyse Garner’s body of work. This comprehensive analysis stretches from Garner’s early work, from the straightforward magical world of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) to the more challenging ‘adolescent fiction’ of The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973). It then moves to analysis of Garner’s subsequent corpus of work that is remarkable for both its thematic continuity and imaginative range, including Strandloper (1996), Thursbitch (2003) and Boneland (2012). His most recent novel, Treacle Walker, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and recent criticism centred on folk horror and hauntology has reignited a critical and public acknowledgement of Garner’s work. -- .