The Stone Age

Winner of the 2021 Highland Book Prize Jen Hadfields new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfields telling, everything gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter. The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfields lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.