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.
A tremendously exciting novel. Rarely making us wait more than twenty pages between set pieces, it executes these with such blood-pumping aplomb that we are grateful for the breathers at the end of them. Then there is the brilliantly realized voice ... Blunt and brutal.
Preston's gifts are abundant. He taps the cadences of northwest England, lopping off the subjects of his sentences, molding idiosyncratic nouns ('nowt' and 'owt') like putty ... strides confidently across its pages, like the seasoned work of a veteran. Preston is already firing on all cylinders, a writer to watch.
Told in the voice of a hardened British farmer, used to nothing but misery and hardship and backbreaking work, and this steely tale will have a lasting effect on the reader.
