‘A pained description of an England that has all but exhausted itself’

Robert Winder, Independent

Winner of the NCR Award for the best non-fiction book of the year

‘The best stories are often those closest to home. Mark Hudson has produced a portrait of a village in England. Horden – where his parents and grandparents lived and dug and brought up families… He weaves the many voices into something that resembles the grandest sort of novel. But not many novelists are able to capture and sift such a tonnage of human experience as this. This is a brilliant work, at once an intimate history of coal-mining in the North-East, a spirited and wise personal memoir, and a pained description of an England that has all but exhausted itself’

A brilliant portrait of a world that is gone for ever, an angry indictment of what has taken its place, a search for meaning in the past, Coming Back Brockens is an extraordinary achievement.

‘Hudson has told the story with emotional and stylistic depth, his eye unfilmed by sentimentality but open to sentiment; generous, open-hearted and quirkily reflective’

Richard Hoggart, Sunday Times

'A beautifully written book which, in looking to the past, has something important to say to us all about life in Britain today.' 

Alan Clark