Devil's Day is a signed, sewn hardback book of 249 pages

printed lithographically, with silk ribbon marker, head and tail bands, and d/w.

 

Limited to 300 signed copies.

 

ISBN 978-1-905784-98-1

 

OUT OF PRINT

 

Please note that the trade edition and ebook is available from John Murray.

 

Devil's Day

by

Andrew Michael Hurley

 

 Winner of the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award for best second novel, 2018

 

All stories in the valley have to begin with the Devil . . .

 

After the blizzard of 1913, it was weeks before anyone got in or out. By that time, what had happened there, what the Devil had done, was already fable.

 

Devil’s Day is a day for children now, of course. A tradition it’s easy to mock, from the outside. But it’s important to remember why we do what we do. It’s important to know what our grandfathers have passed down to us.

 

Because it’s hard to understand, if you’re not from the valley, how this place is in your blood.

 

That’s why I came back, with Kat, and not just because the Gaffer was dead.

 

Though that year we may have let the Devil in after all . . .

 

Reviews:

 

The nebulous presence of the Devil is evoked so palpably in this novel that at times I hardly dared look up when reading for fear of seeing him grinning at me from the chair next to mine. But the book would not be so terrifying were Hurley less adept at making the reader believe in his characters . . . Hurley's riveting, disturbing novel is about the ways in which both communities and families create myths to make sense of their pasts, and about how the comforting embrace of these myths can turn, if they are allowed to become too powerful into a stranglehold — Literary Review

 

The new master of menace. This chilling follow-up to The Loney confirms its author as a writer to watch . . . Hurley doesn't need the devil's help to grip you. His taut writing does that for him. Nature's routine cruelties are caught with a fierce accuracy that Ted Hughes would have admired — Sunday Times

 

 

Published 19th October 2017, simultaneously with the John Murray trade edition.

 

 

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