In the bestselling tradition of Maggie O'Farrell and Esther Freud.
It is the blazing summer of 1981 and Catherine is laid low by childhood illness. Stuck inside her family's sprawling Victorian mansion at the foot of a Highland mountain, she can only look down into the garden and observe the goings-on upon the lawn.
Sam and Rosa, her elder teenage cousins, have come to spend the school holiday in this seemingly idyllic setting, and Catherine savours the brief visits Sam makes to her room. But when Rosa falls in love with Humberto, a young Spanish man camping in the grounds of the house, and Catherine witnesses a violent attack on Sam's beloved dog, the events of that summer take on a darker hue. While Catherine’s parents are forced to confront the inner workings of their marriage, she herself begins her fight for a life void of any more responsibility or surprises. In this twisting tale, the truth is a kaleidoscope of fractured understandings which crystallise over the course of that fateful summer, the consequences of which will reverberate throughout everyone’s lives, reaching their final resolution in the summer of 2008 as a much older and wiser Catherine sits on an Edinburgh doorstep waiting for Rosa to arrive.
Under the Mountain is a fiercely intelligent and beautifully written novel about domestic politics and first loves, and in an unforgettable narrative that is both moving and haunting, Sophie Cooke powerfully exposes hidden inner lives and reveals the sometimes devastating consequences of love and the lies it can tell. This is a remarkable and thought-provoking book, which poses many questions about the way we engage with the world in all its violence and beauty.
Author Biography
Sophie Cooke began her writing career in 2000, aged 23, when she wrote the short story
Why You Should Not Put Your Hand Through The Ice. Her story won runner-up prize in the MacAllan / Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition, which was then the biggest short story award in Europe
. The prize money enabled Cooke to cut back her hours as a barmaid on Glasgow's Great Western Road and write more short stories, which appeared in anthologies. Her first novel,
The Glass House, was published to critical acclaim in 2004 and shortlisted for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award.
Under the Mountain, her new novel, likewise takes the Scottish Highlands as its setting: the country house in which it is set is based on the house in which Cooke lived as a small child. Cooke was educated mainly at McLaren High School in Callander, with brief spells at boarding schools on scholarships. She studied social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Cooke now lives in Berlin, where she is working on her third novel. She also writes poetry and continues to produce short stories.
Reviews
It is Cooke’s dual ability to pick apart beautifully the daytime details of cosy family life while also exploring much loftier themes of God, truth, memory and love that set her aside as a mature, intensely emotional and intelligent writer… Cooke has created a thought-provoking family study, brimming with insight... Although she does not shy away from the murkier or melancholic moments… it is these glimpses of human resilience that give her narration a moving, arresting power,This is a complex, clever novel which on the whole succeeds in its high ambitions,Cooke is excellent on unspoken family tensions and her characters’ psychological motivations always ring true with a density that recalls Virginia Woolf. Of the younger generation of Scottish writers being published now, Cooke is one of the best.,A wise, ambitious and involving work flowering in psychological insight, it leaves less nuanced epics in its shade
