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“So hauntingly lyrical… an extraordinary trip for your imagination. I adored it.”—Maxine Peake
“In startlingly curious, The Pin Jar, Sam Reid evokes Rupert Graves' The Shout. Reid reaches into the past, pulling us deftly into the present, creating a multi-layered text, the sound of which lingers for a long time after reading.’—Ali Millar, author of Ava, Anna, Ada
“That a chorus of ancestral voices told in the deepest Sussex vernacular can create such a pyrotechnic display of poetic language while divining new stories from old England is testament to Sam Reid’s literary gifts. I found The Pin Jar intriguing, unnerving and quite beautiful but also, most importantly, completely original.” – Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallow’s Pole
“Some books bring a new understanding of the world. This is one. Vivid and wild and riveting, The Pin Jar is filled with so many 'fresh wurds’ and new ‘wurls’ that I could hardly bear it to come to an end.” —Lara Haworth, author of Monumenta
“Reid's hypnotic tapestry of stories is a stunning revelation of what literature can do. I have never read anything like it—grounded yet uncanny, otherly but real, tangibly rooted in both ether and earth. A mesmeric reminder of the invisible bridge between storyteller and listener, between the known and unknown, between the present and the past, between the lost and the found. How do we encounter, preserve and inhabit old ways and old stories? How—and why—do we pass them on? The Pin Jar is a masterful awakening of language, style and form... it haunts, intoxicates and doesn't let you go.”—Holly Dawson, author of All Of Us Atoms
“I loved the dark, weird tales captured in The Pin Jar. The earth-deep roots of the Sussex dialect, the unnerving power of the landscape, the eerie musicality of lost voices reverberate through these stories. This is a brilliant new work of folk horror.” —Naomi Booth, author of Animals at Night
A story-cycle from the deep taproot of the Sussex ‘Weald’, The Pin Jar is a record of vernacular folk tales as transcribed by the enigmatic composer and amateur ethnographer Francis J. Cardwell, who habitually, compulsively, taped the various stories and songs he encountered in the now lost pubs of his county. Earthy, half-haunted, dialect-rich—this is the true stuff of deep weird England. SAM REID’S beguiling debut presents us with the folk process of story-telling and song reimagined as a radical literary experiment and fictional archive of place-memory.
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