John Preston’s fourth novel is a quiet dramatisation of the famous Sutton Hoo dig of 1939. Known as ‘the British Tutankhamun’, the excavation in Suffolk uncovered several Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, including one magnificent royal ship burial, and was thrown into relief in September that year by the outbreak of the second world war. The author exploits his setting subtly, as his fragile characters contemplate their lives in the face of history. It’s all a far cry from the mischievous humour of his last novel, Kings of the Roundhouse.
Preston approaches the drama of the excavation, as it develops over the summer months, through the eyes of three of the people involved: Edith Pretty, the widowed owner of Sutton Hoo House, on whose land the burial mounds lie; Basil Brown, the local, self-taught archaeologist she hires to initiate the dig but who is pushed aside when presumptuous dignitaries swarm to the site; and Peggy Piggott, the sturdily built, sensitive wife of one of the archaeologists brought in to help.
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