Ghosts of the Farm – Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community.

Hello there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

But I am thrilled to announce my new book, & reveal its most beautiful cover. Ghosts of the Farm – Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land & Community will be published by my very lovely publishers, Chelsea Green Books, in the UK & US, on 30th September and you can pre-order here, or anywhere you buy your books, if you like. A fitting date, as it’s Michaelmas time, the traditional beginning and end of the new farming year. The cover is a detail from a painting called Day Begins Again by the wonderful Kris Mercer – you can check out her art here.

Set mostly in the fields and farms below Gallows Down, Ghosts of the Farm is a delicious, urgent kind of haunting. It tells the true story of Miss White, a single woman in the 1940s, who hitched up her caravan to pursue her farming dreams. It tells how, reading her diary, I found many parallels and increasing coincidences and was moved to interrogate my own farming ghosts, in those same fields, and in Canada as a cowgirl in the late 80s.

It’s a book about the rural home front during the Second World War, and other, often queer women who farmed then, much-loved, at the heart of their communities – but were then lost from view. It’s a book about rural working women, and finding a way to ‘farm’ in different, diverse ways. It’s about the gateways horses lead us through; it’s about barn owls. It’s about climate & land justice & the northern lights. It’s been a labour of love. I had a fever and when it broke, it became this book. I think it might be the best thing I’ve written yet.

I hope you’ll be tempted to read it, to pre-order perhaps (it really helps get the book noticed) or order from your library to borrow. And I’d be so grateful if you’d help spread the word! Huge thanks to my wonderful editor Muna Reyel and my lovely agent Anne Williams of KHLA and all of you – who have been so patient with this blog. It will be back soon, hopefully with a new look and that promised substack … oh, and I’m more or less off Twitter now, but on Bluesky and Instagram.

In other news, do check out the shortlist for the Climate Fiction Prize and a piece I wrote for The Bookseller, like the longlist (and several books that just missed it by a fraction), it’s an amazing and enjoyable list of books to read. The winner will be announced on the 14th May – and appear at Hay Festival here, in an interview with Owen Sheers.

I’ll also be at Hay Festival, talking all things Guardian Country Diary, and its beautiful anthology Under the Changing Skies, here, with Patrick Barkham, Paul Evans and Martha Kearney.

And I’m at an exciting, brand new two-day festival, Well Read at Wasing, for books, writing, nature and wellness at the beautiful Wasing Estate in Berkshire with a Writing Workshop: Finding the Wild Inside Workshop: Writing for Nature Connection and Wellness, Sunday 25th May 2025 6pm – 7.30pm.