A Stone Is a Story by Leslie Barnard Booth

And senses her ancestors all around her as many others have followed this path the footprints are there for her to see. She sees the palm of a hand on a wall and a paining of a bull. Joseph takes Mary on an underground journey following a path where she reads the geology as she finds her way to a spot where her father carved his stonemason’s mark. School in the Victorian era in which she lives, time of the growth of railways, costs more money than her family can afford. Mary wants a book, even though she can’t read.

Robert is making his mark as a builder involved in the construction of churches and buildings made from local stone. See this thread for more information.įirst book in a series of four names The Stone Quartet, this book is about Mary the daughter of a stone mason Robert. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

In 2012, he finally published a third book in the Weirdstone trilogy. In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. Instead he produced a string of further fantasy novels, Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973). Garner completed a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but left the third book of the trilogy he had envisioned. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960.

Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the nearby village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern building known as Toad Hall. His work is firmly rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.īorn into a working-class family in Congleton, Cheshire, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as 'The Edge', where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region.

Alan Garner OBE (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist who is best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales.

A Stone Is a Story by Leslie Barnard Booth