Margaret Meek

Margaret Meek maintained that this book shows already the compelling narrative skill of the undoubted storyteller.

Margaret Meek judged this to be, partly on account of the setting, the most Kiplingesque of Sutcliff's books, as well as the best she had written by the early 1960s. The TLS review...

Sutcliffe's high reputation brought her the honour of a monograph in the Bodley Head series on children's writers (1962, authored by Margaret Meek ). In 1983, she appeared on the popular radio programme Desert Island Discs.

The Norsemen settled in which is now Cumberland slaughter the party of troops coming with hostile violence to survey the land and enumerate the population and resources. Sutcliff vividly renders a landscape which she knew...