I have read a lot of books this year, but this may be the most extraordinary. Four novellas, each about a child in a different generation of the same family, at a moment of discovery or grace or insight, intersected by people and words, places and ideas, shapes and histories, resonant with the shared myth of family and craft.

There are people who write spare prose that is sharp and precise and economical; hard-boiled sometimes. Alan Garner's prose is stripped and polished, but the result is beautifully, poetically evocative. Language for Garner is not just surface, it is something that goes all the way down, sedimentary geological layers, with the spoken sounds and read letters merely the visible features of millennia of history expressed unwittingly and perceived unknowingly. There is no sense of loss or grief in these books as things pass and people pass (though I cried twice reading it) but the sense that all things exist in their brief bright moment, and survive in the language and the actions and the genes of their ancestors and in the very bones of the place where they lived, shaping the lives of those who come after in invisible ways, only manifesting in rare secret physical forms: a name carved on a hidden block in a church steeple or a clay pie unearthed with the potatoes. So we live and commune with what has gone before, ignorant but not ignored. So we become the place where we live. Marks carved in books of stone, with love.