An ethereal, deeply felt tale of redemption and the haunting pull of the past.
Ford’s latest is a finely woven novel where the quiet realism of the English countryside meets the shimmer of the mystical and the depths of the human mind. A mysterious man named Miles appears out of the drizzle to join a walking group in the Surrey Hills, curiosity turns to unease. He leads them to Miteby, a place too perfect to be real, suspended somewhere between memory and myth. In the shadows, Miles’s rival, Lucifix, waits to claim the fallen.
The novel breathes in the texture of the English countryside, while threading its realism with something uncanny. Miteby becomes less a place than a mirror of longing, where Ford explores the human instinct to rewrite one’s own story. The writing has a quiet luminosity, its rhythm echoing the steady pace of a long walk: deliberate, meditative, punctuated by revelation: “Set in the woodland clearing in an unspoiled corner of the Surrey hills, the wheels crunched over crumbling, fungus-encrusted remnants of an old log.” When the story hints that the walkers’ visions may stem from poisonous mushrooms, Ford doesn’t offer neat answers. Instead, he leaves readers balancing between reason and wonder, the material and the mystical. Readers seeking an atmospheric story steeped in English landscapes and spiritual mystery will be richly rewarded.
A haunting, beautifully wrought novel that asks what lies beyond the visible world—and whether confronting our ghosts is the same as escaping them.
Pub date November 16, 2023
Cinnamon Press
ISBN 978-1788649896
Price $16.00 (USD) Paperback, $10.99 Kindle edition