Tales of the Ridings

The Yorkshire moors, ancient and windswept, form the beating heart of this collection. Moorman writes with the tenderness of someone who knows these hills and the people who shepherd them are disappearing. The first story, "A Laocoon of the Rocks," introduces Peregrine Ibbotson, whose life is unraveling as the enclosure movement closes in on the common lands he has walked for generations. This is not mere nostalgia: Moorman understands that what is being lost is a whole way of being in the world, a relationship between human and landscape that modern progress cannot replace. The dialect, the customs, the hard wisdom of Yorkshire folk all live here, preserved in amber. For readers who loved Wuthering Heights or the novels of Thomas Hardy, these stories offer another portrait of England before the断层.