Black Sheep - Tapa dura

"Powerful... Poignant, bleak and haunting, this is a small masterpiece" (Sunday Mirror)

"Compulsively readable" (Irish Examiner)

"Hill deploys her not inconsiderable power to weave a haunting story" (Daily Mail)

"Beautifully, even lovingly, told" (Scotsman)

"There is something Hardyesque in the tragic momentum of this story" (Guardian)

"Gripping all the way to its unexpected end" (Simon Baker Spectator)

"A perfectly judged story of people living hard, narrow lives" (Observer)

"Hill's beautiful, soulful descriptions of pit village life make this every bit as gripping as her longer spine-chilling stories" (Sunday Mirror)

"In this taught, tense story, written with that unsparing economy which is such a feature of Hill's recent fiction, everyone longs to escape... Ted is thoughtful, compassionate, loving and misguidedly chivalrous... The sparseness of Hill's style provides the perfect medium for exploring his predicament" (East Anglian Daily Times)

"Hill's taut prose exudes a constant darkness... you are left unsettled and haunted by the seeming inevitability of their troubled lives" (Stylist)

The village is called Mount of Zeal. It’s built in a bowl like an amphitheatre, with the winding gear where the stage would be. The pit lies below.

Ted Howker’s school is on the edge of Lower Terrace next to the chapel. Upper Terrace – in a thunderous echo of the Bible so loved by Ted’s grandfather – is Paradise. Ted and his father and his brothers live in Middle. In the beginning: a household of men, all of whom work in the pit...

Susan Hill is an exceptional writer at the height of her powers. Every word is precisely right: the descriptions of the village and the pit, the people and the farm are exact and true; the heartbreak is inevitable yet new; and the imagery and imagination take your breath away.