Client details

James Buchan is a freelance writer who lives with his family in Norfolk. His novels have won major literary awards, including the Whitbread First Novel Award for A PARISH OF RICH WOMEN and the Guardian Fiction Prize for HEART'S JOURNEY IN WINTER, and have been translated into a dozen foreign languages. His latest book, THE GATE OF AIR, was recently nominated for the 2009 Ondaatje Prize.

For any enquiries about film & television, please contact Charles Walker at United Agents.

Latest publication:

THE GATE OF AIR, Quercus, 01 Oct 08
Jim Smith, ousted by City financiers from his computer software company, retreats to an old farmhouse in the remote West of England.  Though he knows nothing of country life, he takes on livestock and crops, a dog, and a labourer of mysterious and independent habits.

One night Jim is visted by convulsive dreams of a beautiful woman, and at dinner with the local magnate, he sees a ghost.  His pastoral idyll disintegrates.  All the certainties and reassurances of modern life vanish, and Jim must deal alone with elemental and implacable forces as old as his fields and woods.

THE GATE OF AIR is both an exploration of a disturbed modernity and a fireside spine-chiller of Victorian vigour and conviction.

Reviews:

'Not only a brilliant study of rural decay and the tragedy of the commons, but also both an unsettling ghost story and a strangely moving romance, and it succeeds beautifully on all those levels' John Burnside, The Times

'Beguiling, poetic prose ... a moving meditation on what it is to love and lose' John Harding, Daily Mail

'Layers a peeled off the palimpsest of the English landscape, and of literature itself...the book's final paragraph is nothing short of magical... [Buchan] is a novelist who takes no literary convention for granted, and each book he writes is a discovery.' Stephen Poole, Guardian