‘A fascinating, haunting pilgrimage through a personal and collective pas … a moving exploration through the ages, excavating clues as to what it means to be alive, to be human, to belong'

JADE ANGELES FITTON, HERMIT

'Both intimate and universal, Wendy Pratt’s brave and luminous memoir reminds us of the healing power of landscape to connect us not just to the ancient people who once lived on the land we now call home, but also to ourselves'

SARAH LANGFORD, ROOTED

Publication Date: 15th August 2024

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The Ghost Lake is a deeply personal, lyrical and stirring meditation on local history and changing landscapes that intertwines nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging and the lives and legacies of rural working‐class people.

I am setting out on a pilgrimage through an ancient landscape.

I will begin at my daughter’s grave.

Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years to prehistoric times. Over the millennia, the vast lake disappeared, turning to wetland and peaty fields. Today all that is left of it is a watermark.

Wendy Pratt brings the reader on a pilgrimage around the ghost lake, to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she reflects on the process of finding belonging in nature as a woman who exists in a series of liminal spaces – as a working-class writer, an infertile woman in a fertile world and a bereaved mother in a society focused on children.

An early draft of The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize.

'A powerful exploration of loss, place, connection and self, every page running rich with poetic detail. I devoured it slowly, wanting to savour every word'

ADAM FARRER, COLD FISH SOUP

'From the tender rituals of caring for her daughter’s grave to her thoughtful exploration of nearby burial chambers, Wendy Pratt interlaces the strands of her life to form a moving memoir of finding belonging. The Ghost Lake invokes the generative power of setting your own creative path through life and illustrates the importance of attuning to nature'

SALLY HUBAND, SEA BEAN

'Wendy Pratt has created a shimmering, liminal space of loss that lifts us up and carries us with such tenderness and beauty that we come out the other side transformed'

VICTORIA BENNETT, ALL MY WILD MOTHERS

‘The Ghost Lake is a mesmerising and deeply sensory lyric memoir that will carry you with it as it journeys across and into the archive of the landscape, unearthing treasures in the debris of grief, difference and loss’

POLLY ATKIN, SOME OF US JUST FALL

‘Wendy Pratt uses her connection to her beloved Yorkshire landscape to travel back and forward in time, examining how we can honour our ways of thinking instead of being afraid of them, and how a self can be lost and found again’

-KIM MOORE, ALL THE MEN I NEVER MARRIED