Shameless Wayne
Overlooked for more than a century, Halliwell Sutcliffe’s novel is a forgotten classic.
“From these same moors, when dawn of August day strides ruddy up the mists, another country shows itself, though the same hills guard the self-same valleys…The heather at your feet steams with warm incense of its bloom. The larch-spinney at the edge of the broken fields takes shape through the curling wreaths of mist. Nothing is revealed in haste. It is as though you watched the world’s creation all afresh”
Set amidst the hills and high lands of Yorkshire, Shameless Wayne is an epic tale of two feuding families – the Waynes of Marsh and the Ratcliffes of Wildwater.
When Anthony Wayne is killed by Dick Ratcliffe, it falls to the eldest Wayne son, the reckless and dissolute Ned, to take on the family farm and exact revenge for his father’s death. As he struggles to rise to the challenge, his task is complicated by his feelings towards the headstrong Janet, of the hated Wildwater clan.
Shameless Wayne is a vivid evocation of rural life and the old ways of farming, shot through with folk magic, violent confrontations and forbidden love.
Buy the paperback here.
