Marie-Elsa Bragg

towards-mellbreak

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

source_10558

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our <a href="/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Keep an eye out for a confirmation in your inbox

Stories, ideas and giveaways to help you spark young imaginations

source_10972

The latest books, activities and tips to help you grow little readers

source_10975

About us

About Us (Header 4)

john-le-carre-a-legacy-of-spies-960-2.jpg

Margaret Atwood

Richard Osman

Malorie Blackman

George Orwell

marian_keyes_mobile_320x200px.png

Elif Shafak

shonfaye

Authors (Header 3)

Books (Header 2)

Company

Features (Header 1)

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Towards Mellbreak

A really extraordinary, beautiful meditation on place and time, tradition and identity... passionate, quiet, political

This novel is so subtly written, building up the stories of good people and their tough lives, that we feel and then understand the depth of their relationships to each other and this beautiful, hard land - and so the tragedy of what happens is all the more heartbreaking.

How refreshing to find a first novel that does not read like the stilted product of a creative writing course… Bragg… not only displays a remarkable gift of observation – of human beings, animals, landscapes – but has written an impassioned elegy for a way of life that has come into head-on collision with the modern world

A literary force... In so richly depicting the hermetic bond between the Cumbrian landscape and the people who live there, she makes a subtle political point about the ease with which governments and big business disregard those whose lives are, for the most part, hidden from view

Toward Mellbreak tells the story of struggling Cumbrian fell farmers, with a blunt lyrical richness that is resonant of Ted Hughes

A lyrical and compelling generational story of Cumbrian hill farmers that wears its spiritual seriousness of purpose lightly but oh so movingly

Savagely elegant… If Thomas Hardy had ventured to historic Cumberland, this is the tenor of the tale that he would have written… Bragg writes with cinematic poetry: in empathetic close-up to her few characters, in wide-angled landscape illumination of the fell&shy;scapes that both liberate and contain them. The world that she conjures so deftly is a world away from the visitors’ Lake District… Sometimes in clipped sentences like gasped breath, sometimes by unfurling parables of light over landscapes, Bragg recreates an extra&shy;ordinary, often disregarded world, uniting farm and fell, work and prayer, suffering and redemption in new and powerful ways

This is a book which stayed with me well after I finished it… A very thoughtful book with plenty to mull over

A closely observed rural family chronicle, a fierce indictment of the ignorant authoritarianism of government agencies in recent decades promoting untried, environmentally disastrous and lethally poisonous pesticides in the countryside, and an understated but strong celebration of spiritual discovery and resilience

After many generations, it is now Harold who runs Ard Farm. Out on the fells, he feels his father’s presence, and there is hope that he, his grandmother and his Uncle Joe will be able to take the farm forward and prosper. But their way of life is under threat: farming is undergoing huge change and increasingly harmful intervention. 
 
Towards Mellbreak is a hymn both to the landscape of Cumbria and to a disappearing world. Poetic, beautiful and tragic, it exposes the struggle to preserve traditions and beliefs in the face of change, and an assertion of the power to be found in the rituals we pass down through our families.

Debut novel set in rural Cumbria, based on real events, the poetic, heartbreaking story of four generations of one farming family

Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is half French, half Cumbrian and was brought up in London. She studied Philosophy and Theology at the University of Oxford, and trained for the Priesthood at Ripon College Cuddesdon. She is a Priest in the diocese of London, an Ignatian spiritual director, a therapist and a Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey. Her first novel, Towards Mellbreak, was published in 2017.

Towards Mellbreak

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

Reviews

About the author

Marie-Elsa Bragg

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter