Paul Kingsnorth

Everyone knows the date of the Battle of Hastings. Far fewer people know what happened next. Set in the three years after the Norman invasion of 1066, THE WAKE will tell the story of a fractured band of guerilla fighters who take up arms against the invaders. It is hung carefully on the known historical facts about the almost forgotten, decade-long war of underground resistance which spread across England in the decade after 1066. It is a story of the collapse of certainties and lives; a tale of lost gods and haunted visions, narrated by a man of the Lincolnshire fens bearing witness to the end of his world.

The Wake

"A work that is as disturbing as it is empathetic, as beautiful as it is riveting." —Eimear McBride, New Statesman In the aftermath of the Norman Invasion of 1066, William the Conqueror was uncompromising and brutal. English society was broken apart, its systems turned on their head. What is little known is that a fractured network of guerrilla fighters took up arms against the French occupiers. In The Wake, a postapocalyptic novel set a thousand years in the past, Paul Kingsnorth brings this dire scenario back to us through the eyes of the unforgettable Buccmaster, a proud landowner bearing witness to the end of his world. Accompanied by a band of like-minded men, Buccmaster is determined to seek revenge on the invaders. But as the men travel across the scorched English landscape, Buccmaster becomes increasingly unhinged by the immensity of his loss, and their path forward becomes increasingly unclear. Written in what the author describes as "a shadow tongue"—a version of Old English updated so as to be understandable to the modern reader—The Wake renders the inner life of an Anglo-Saxon man with an accuracy and immediacy rare in historical fiction. To enter Buccmaster's world is to feel powerfully the sheer strangeness of the past. A tale of lost gods and haunted visions, The Wake is both a sensational, gripping story and a major literary achievement.

A Novel

Janice Hopper

This was a challenging read in more ways than one.

The language the book was written in was a bit of a challenge. I did spend a good part of one evening's reading in reading aloud to myself. That really helped me get used to the words and to pull the meaning out. It definitely gets easier as you go along and you get more used to the writing.

I've seen this described as a post-apocalyptic novel. The apocalypse, in this case, was the Norman invasion/conquest of England in 1066. We follow the story of Buccmaster of Holland, whose world was absolutely shattered by the invaders. We come to learn that Buccmaster, however, was pretty broken himself long before the French came. He sees himself as one of the last of the true men of England.

Unfortunately, as we come to see, his self-assessment may not be quite accurate.

It's a sad, rather brutal story. It's not gory, just harsh and unflinching. And very well done.

The Wake

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