The Stone Book Quartet

The Stone Book Quartet is four related novellas bound together in chronological order. They tell the stories of people in different generations of the same family at moments of vocation or clarity in their lives. Each book is written with such care, there seem to be no spare words.

The presentation of the book suggests that it's for children. Its print is on the large side, and each page has a border. Also, the main character of each story is a child. The themes of vocation to a craft and finding one's identity bound up with a place are ones that adults can appreciate too, though, and the storytelling is not obviously meant for children.

You could read through this slender volume in an hour or two
–the print is larger, so there aren't a lot of words on each page, and the vocabulary is not hard–but you'd miss the beauty of the story. If you find a copy of this book in your hand, read slowly, one story at a time, with pauses in between.

A beautifully written elegy for a time long gone, The Stone Book Quartet features four interlinked stories, spanning more than a century, about one day in the life of four generations of Garner's family. These are stories of craftsmen, stone cutters, blacksmiths, passing on their knowledge and craft, the secrets of their trades. But they are also stories of change, of a vanishing way of life, of loss and progress.

Set in and around Chorley in Cheshire, where Garner's family has lived for generations, there is a pared down directness to the writing that means no word is wasted. No sentence is superfluous. Each short tale is moving in its own way, from the stone cutter showing his daughter the secret cave his family have visited for hundreds of years, to the blacksmith ending his time during the second world war surrounded by the shades of his forebears.

This is some of Garner's best writing, a book for everyone. Superb.