THE BORROWED HILLS by Scott Preston, 2024, 9781668050675.
Guy grows up with an incredibly emotionally distant father in the sheep and hill country of Cumbria. His mother up and leaves when he is a child. Guy leaves home to drive long-haul trucks. Gets called back when father is ill and ends up helping his father and a neighbor with destroying all the stock when Foot-and-Mouth outbreak. The work rounding up, killing the sheep, and burning the corpses.
The Foot-Mouth experience is awful. The work is 24 hours a day and walking through the smoke and soot of burning sheep corpses. Guy finishes that help, gets fed up with father, leaves a couple more years, returns when father dies.
Guy takes on "work" with Neighbor. No pay to speak of. Guy just works and lives on the farm. His life is work, visits to the pub, and poorly hidden infatuation with Neighbor's Wife that Guy knew in school.
Neighbor joins with a regional crook on a theft of sheep from down South. Things just get worse and worse from there.
Comments:
1. No. Names are not needed. I barely noticed them, really. Just a way to tell the difference among the two primaries and three others.
2. Probably a ton of symbolism and literary methods I never recognized or parsed.
3. Not sure I'd recommend this or not.
