These Silent Mansions

A wide-ranging, unpredictable and refreshingly original meditation on a huge but widely ignored subject: the relationship between the living and the dead... Exhilarating... This is a lovely book: beautifully written, never lapsing into self-conscious 'poet's prose', always a joy to read. I wish I had written it myself. -- Nigel Andrew * Literary Review * Cemetery tales, filled with fascinating details and told with a poet's skill... Delightfully morbid... Sprackland roves about history, language, biology, architecture, entomology, iconography and much else in her quest for meaning... [and] the astonishing twist...should justify your reading These Silent Mansions in its entirety. -- Anthony Quinn * Guardian * Shot through with delightful digressions... There is a spare beauty to Sprackland's prose... These Silent Mansions is a strange and mercurial book; hard to pin down, but even harder to forget. -- Lucy Scholes * i * Sprackland has the poet's knack for atmosphere and a magician's ability to conjure up other worlds. She is like a ghostly time traveller... Sprackland is particularly agile, though, at exploring the ways in which a graveyard reflects its community and how, with modern life, we are losing this sense of connection. -- Ann Treneman * The Times * Part social history, part personal meditation and wholly enchanting - as attentive to local and moving details as it is to the fact of mortality itself. -- Andrew Motion