A novel set in the rugged, rural landscape of northwest England where two sheep farmers lose their flocks and decide to reverse their fortunes by stealing sheep from a rich farm in the south.
The first third of The Borrowed Hills unfolds with a pleasurable, slow-burn assurance ... What follows is an antic procession of action-movie clichés ... Once the Tinley plot reaches its blood-soaked conclusion, the novel gets back on track, returning to the original cast in its elegiac final third ... At its most resonant and powerful when the human drama does not overwhelm, but takes its proper place in the pitiless and timeless landscape on which all of nature’s tenants — man and animal alike — live and die.
Blistering ... Despite the wild beauty of the landscape, there is something claustrophobic about Preston’s novel: the tyranny of a place that demands relentless back-breaking labour and will never pay back what is given ... This is a sucker-punch of a novel, a viscerally vivid portrait of desperation, edged with knife-sharp black humour and shot through with moments of startling beauty, but there is little hope in it. Angry as it was, Rebanks’s book was a love letter to Cumbria. The connection to the land goes just as deep here, but, bound to a place that demands so much in return for so little, it is a more dysfunctional relationship.
Spiky ... The language has a meaty quality ... Not a vast, ambitious novel that tries to do everything, but a precisely focused one with flavour, intensity and oodles of character — and God knows we need more of those.
