SENI GLAISTER worked as a bookseller for much of her career before founding WeFiFo, the social dining platform, in 2016. Her first novel, The Museum of Things Left Behind, was published in 2015. She lives on a farm in West Sussex with her husband and children.
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Seni Glaister 2019
Seni Glaister asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008285005
For my inspirational and indispensable mother, Penelope Glaister.
And in memory of
Mary Ann Brailsford 1791 – 1852
Marie Ann Smith 1800 – 1870
John Clarke 1889 – 1980
& the other unsung heroes of the orchards and fields.
Contents
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
Doubler was the second biggest potato grower in the county. While it was true that his rival grew more potatoes than he did (by a significant margin), Doubler was unperturbed. Doubler’s personal motivation was not quantity but quality, and the mere fact that his adversary had more land than he did had very little to do with their respective skills as potato growers.
Unlike his rival, Doubler was an expert. He understood potatoes in a way that potatoes had rarely been understood. He understood potatoes at least as well, he hoped, as that other potato great John Clarke. Mr Clarke, the infamous grower and breeder of potatoes, was Doubler’s inspiration and Doubler sought his counsel often, asking questions out loud as he walked his land and finding the answers whispered to him each day as he worked on his notes, annotating his day’s findings. Though they’d never met and Clarke himself had been dead for some decades, Doubler found enormous solace in their dialogue.
Recently, Doubler’s experimentation had been going extremely well, and certain that he was close to securing his place in potato-growing history, he now carried within him (sometimes in his heart and sometimes in his stomach) a small, hope-shaped nugget of excitement. Doubler was not an optimistic man by nature, and the knowledge that he might soon take his seat among the most impactful potato growers of all time fuelled Doubler with a thrill of nervous energy, tinged by impatience but darkened by anxiety.
To Doubler, his