Treacle Walker

by Alan Garner

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize

An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers.

An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world. Living alone in an old house, he spends his time reading comic books, collecting birds’ eggs, and playing with marbles. When one day a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears on a horse and cart, offering a cure-all medicine, a mysterious friendship develops and the young boy is introduced to a world beyond his wildest imagination.

Luminous, evocative, and sparely told, Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668025512
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	11/14/2023
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Alan Garner is an English novelist, born in Cheshire in 1934. His childhood was spent in Alderley Edge, where his family has lived for more than four hundred years. His book The Owl Service won the Guardian Award and the Carnegie Medal, and was made into a TV series. It established itself as a contemporary classic and Garner as a writer of distinction. His novel Treacle Walker was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded the OBE in for his services to literature.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter I

Editorial Reviews

Playful, moving and wholly remarkable.” —The Guardian

“A charming fable about the convolutions of time and magic... the pleasure here is in the book's fresh, playful twisted vernacular, the way Garner uses English folklore and old-fashioned linguistic legerdemain to get at big ideas... alluring, elusive, and quick.” —Kirkus

“Creative and highly enjoyable... Somehow breathlessly paced without feeling rushed, this excellent novella features the trademark accents and dialogue found in Garner's tales throughout his career as well as wondrously evocative descriptions. This Italo Calvino-like feat of imagination is nourishing in the way all great stories are.” —Booklist

“Hypnotic and surreal...Garner blends accessible prose with elliptical references to Northern England mythology...alluring.” —Publishers Weekly

“A small miracle.” —New Statesman

“There’s mastery of craft, resonance and deep feeling on every page.” —The Telegraph

“Steeped in northern English myth and folklore.” —The New York Times Book Review

“One of these delightful books that I secretly wish I wrote.” —Marlon James

“Alan Garner is indisputably the great originator... I salute him with the most heartfelt respect and admiration.” —Philip Pullman

“Alan Garner’s fiction is something special.” —Neil Gaiman

“A marvel. It’s hard to think of anything quite like it. Not many books dream aloud and invite the reader into that dream. One of its odd, generous charms is that each time I returned to it to find where I’d left off, I wasn’t sure if the sentence would be there, or if I’d imagined it.” —BookPost USA

“A slim and powerful novel of memory, mortality, and landscape.” —Tor.com

From the Publisher

2023-08-12
A brief, cryptic, often charming fable about the convolutions of time and magic.

In ways, this book looks like a YA novel of the type its octogenarian author is well known for: It features a solitary boy named Joseph Coppock who wears a patch to combat lazy eye and lives, alone, in a rural house. Joseph seems to spend his days reading comics, wandering the marsh, and marking the passage of the noon train. At the beginning the boy encounters a rag-and-bone man, the eponymous Treacle Walker, and trades ratty pajamas and a lamb bone for a cup and a sort of pumice stone. Soon he's dealing with incursions of and excursions into magic: interacting with characters who've emerged from his comics, bartering with a bog-dwelling time lord named Thin Amren, even receiving a Latin incantation by way of an eye chart only he can see. Amren tells him he has the "glamourie," which seems at times to mean literally that he has one eye that sees ordinary reality and another that focuses on the mysterious and otherworldly. But in a way such a reading misses the point; the main adult pleasure here is in the book's fresh, playful twisted vernacular, the way Garner uses English folklore and old-fashioned linguistic legerdemain to get at big ideas. "Time is ignorance," reads the epigraph, and Garner seems to imply that tedious adult ideas like plot and chronology hold no sway here. This is a book that takes place before the binocular vision of youth and the child's comfort with mystery have fully faded or flattened (though the through-line, if there is one, has to do with Joseph's desire to grow up and set magic aside).

Alluring, elusive, and quick—a fable for adolescents, and for those willing to revisit the murk and jumble of adolescence.

Kirkus Reviews