Quietly and modestly, Howard Cunnell has established himself as one of Britain's most distinctive and trustworthy voices and with his latest memoir he's taken another step clear of the pack. Sun Country is a bracing swim through a sea of grief and bewilderment. Few write as well about origins and fealty and fewer still offer such a vision of bruised and dogged love. This is a beautiful book.

TIM WINTON, award-winning author of Cloudstreet

Bold, beautiful and entirely unique, Sun Country is less a memoir than a concentration on the present at a moment of turbulence. It is a book to lose yourself inside, and emerge from with enhanced clarity and wisdom

FRANCES WILSON, Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted author of Electric Spark

Sun Country is a book rich with ghosts, and tender with loss and a search for home. It's told in exquisitely-crafted prose, the sentences honed to a fine point. Beautiful, rigorous work

KERRY ANDREW, composer and author of We Are Together Because

A beautiful, bittersweet book. Sun Country weaves together stories from the distant and recent past, of ancestors and family, strangers and friends. A book about the circling nature of time, and the ever-presence of the past, Cunnell writes with so much sensitivity to the poignancy and sacredness of the everyday, describing ostensibly unremarkable moments with such precision they transform into deeply moving, meaningful scenes

SARA BAUME, author of Seven Steeples

A profound personal meditation on time, place, love and loss that is also a valuable history of the struggle of all working class people to reach beyond the confinements of poverty and the limits of opportunity to create art of timeless wisdom and enduring beauty. Battleworn he may be, but Cunnell remains a soul survivor

CATHI UNSWORTH, author of Season of the Witch

A memory quest that travels bravely, swims deep, hangs out, scavenges. Floats free, with tide and against. And brings the bounty home. To the heart.

IAIN SINCLAIR, author of PARIAH GENIUS