Spirit of the Place

Lyndsey Lovelock, university student, writes a long study on an eighteenth century poet, Nicholas Fowler. Rod, her scientist boyfriend, longs to know what research project is taking place in Coswold, once Fowler's home, now part of the university. In 1773, Nicholas Fowler builds a Grotto, dabbles in the new science of electricity, and believes Man is on the point of mastering Nature. What unearthly power binds them all together?

"It's a marvellous story, put together with great ingenuity. Dennis Hamley seems to have got right inside the eighteenth century (one of my own favourite places to visit), heroic couplets and all. It made me want to go out at once and build a Grotto in the garden." Philip Pullman

"Dennis Hamley cleverly sets the eighteenth-century aesthetic of controlling and shaping the landscape against current strivings to understand and control the genetic make-up of humans. Fowler's poetry is convincingly eighteenth-century - it takes an accomplished writer to pull that off. Intriguing, unusual, engrossing."  Linda Newbery