Lucy Hughes-Hallett Interviewed by Nick Clark

Award-winning biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett talks about her first novel – a haunting tale about game keepers, witches, agitators and aristocrats.

Peculiar Ground shifts between the 17th century, as a wall is built around a great house, and the modern era, as a wall both goes up to divide Berlin and later comes down. It is a story of aging, of young love and about how those who seek to wall others out find themselves walled in.

‘A rich layering of history and fiction . . .  Erudite, elegant but easy-going . . .  One of the best novels of the year so far’ The Times

Hughes-Hallett is author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio that won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. She is also author of Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen.

Here she talks to Nick Clark, features editor of The Stage and a former arts correspondent of The Independent.

Fiction