Hughes’s novel is wonderful on the detail of a late 20th-century rural English childhood
… Tatton Park in Cheshire.
Pearl by Siân Hughes review – a circling story of memory and loss
Taking a Middle English classic as its inspiration, this is a novel about a lasting grief that echoes through time
Barney Norris
Friday 25 August 2023
T
he unidentified 14th-century “Pearl poet” left behind a single manuscript written in Cheshire dialect, containing Pearl, Gawain and the Green Knight and two other religious poems. The manuscript is among the most treasured salvagings of Middle English literature, a crucial part of our rich inheritance as readers of English poetry. While most readers are more likely to know Gawain, Pearl is an extraordinary work about love, grief and faith, strikingly filled with suicidal ideation.
