'Just as devotees of certain television shows dream of finding lost episodes and Beatles fans imagine opening a box and fishing out recordings of forgotten studio sessions, so readers long for ways to extend the pleasure they receive from beloved writers. In this regard Jane Gardam has been more than accommodatingHer territory isn't young or old; it's the heart-and brain-matter of people, their desires and worries and fantasies and intricate interactions. All of this is set capably against a particular landscape, and the result tends to be vivid and real. Beautiful, like Willa Cather' Meg Wolitzer, New York TimesThe Hollow Land captures the beauty of the barren Cumbrian countryside, and among its few inhabitants, the lives of two young boys, Bill Teesdale and Harry Bateman. Bill, from a farming family, has been raised in the dialect, hard work, and myth of the fells. His new friend Harry is a tourist whose family spends summer holidays there every year. The pair's inseparable friendship provides a series of delightful adventures rendered with Gardam's gorgeous detail and sure use of humour

Jane Gardam has a spectacular gift for detail of the local and period kind, and for details which made characters so subtly unpredictable that they ring true - Times Literary SupplementGardam's prose is so economical that no moment she describes is either gratuitous or wasted - New Yorker