Meet Me at the Surface C444868730116

A haunting ode to Cornish folklore and the secrets of the places we call home

'This powerfully brutal novel is the most exciting thing I've read in years' S. J. WATSON

'A strange and beautiful novel' OBSERVER

'A book where language feels like hands reaching into the soil, where landscapes feel alive, where sentences, houses and memory are suffused with the uncanny' TOM DE FRESTON

Everything that comes from the ground has to go back down... eventually

Merryn grew up on the wilds of Bodmin moor, raised by her mother and her aunt in an old farmhouse. Here, the locals never leave the village, fear for the future of their farms and cling desperately to the folkloric tales that are woven into their history. Except Merryn, who has escaped to Manchester for university, briefly untethering herself from her past.

When Merryn returns home for the memorial service of her ex-girlfriend Claud, she finds her childhood home stranger and more secretive than ever. She's sure that her mother is hiding something. The villagers are hunting on the moors at night, but for what? And then there's a notebook, found in an old chest of drawers, full of long-forgotten folklore that seems to be linked somehow to Claud...

Jodie Matthews is a queer Cornish writer and poet, living and working in the West Midlands as a gardener. She has written for numerous publications including Ladybeard, Parallel, and Ramona magazines, and she runs a successful bookstagram account @jodierhianmatthews. Meet Me At The Surface is her first novel, and it was shortlisted for the Bath Novel Award and the Blue Pencil First Novel Award 2021.