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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.
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.
Wendy Pratt is a poet, author, editor and workshop facilitator living and working on the North Yorkshire coast, where she grew up. She is the author of five collections of poetry. Her collection When I Think of My Body as a Horse won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet award in 2021. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine and facilitates online and in-person writing courses and workshops.
"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
"A fascinating, haunting pilgrimage through a personal and collective past. In The Ghost Lake, Pratt embarks on 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
"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. An astounding work of internal and external history"
– Adam Farrer, Cold Fish Soup
"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
"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
"Steadfastly honest [...] views nature as a refuge rather than a cure. Many should find solace here"
– Geographical
