Today is my birthday. Tomorrow Hild is out in paperback in the UK. The best present you could give me? Go buy it!

It’s newly and lusciously typeset. At 640 pages, it’s more capacious and beautiful than ever before. I’ve put together a good list of UK independent bookshops so you can get it there. Or you could use your favourite chain or online retailer:

Waterstones | Amazon | Foyles | Blackwell’s

Also available in Australia and New Zealand:

 Booktopia | Bookworld | Paper Plus | Mighty Ape | Amazon | iTunes

Still not sure? Go read the first chapter or watch me read the beginning.

Praise

• “Vivid, richly detailed…a powerful, clever novel. Griffith illuminates the so-called Dark Ages, reconstructing an often alien historical world with great precision.” — BBC History Magazine

• “A magnificent and convincing portrayal of a strange, wild, beautiful world.” — Alison Flood, Guardian

• “Beautiful, thorny jacket for this beautiful literary novel. It genuinely brings the period to life.” — The Bookseller

• “You could describe Hild as being like Game of Thrones without the dragons, but this is so much deeper than that, so much richer. A glorious, intensely passionate walk through an entirely real landscape, Hild leads us into the dark ages and makes them light, and tense, and edgy and deeply moving.” — Manda Scott

• “In its ambition and intelligence, Hild might best be compared to Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell.” — Bookforum

• “Hild is a book as loving as it is fierce, brilliant and accomplished. To read it felt like a privilege and a gift.” — NPR

• “…dazzling… Griffith’s lyrical prose emphasizes the savagery of the political landscape, in which religion, sex, and superstition are wielded mercilessly for personal gain.” — Paris Review Daily

• “The novel resonates to many of the same chords as Beowulf, the legends of King Arthur, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones—to the extent that Hild begins to feel like the classic on which those books are based.” — Neal Stephenson

• “Griffith’s narrative flows like a river; Hild’s thoughts and deeds are expressed in pitch-perfect tone, in prose approaching poetry.” — Historical Novel Society

• “The best fictional attempt to recreate Dark Age Britain that I have ever read.” — Alex Woolf