Overview

It is 1957 and a Russian jet flies over Foulness Island. The photograph it takes starts a chain reaction, alarming military intelligence and unsettling the Essex farming community that endures within its barbed-wire enclosure. James arrives with orders to camouflage this secret installation. But despite orderly Miss Bradshaw's efforts, an abandoned Victorian printing press soon diverts his attention away from tripwire fears to Foulness' colonial past. The cannons of the British Empire and the British Atom bomb were refined beside this perilous tidal path known as The Broomway. Rockets tested over Thames sandbanks turned on an Abyssinian mountain fortress. The A-bomb transported to Australia's already devastated Aboriginal lands. Foulness traces trajectiories from Victorian Imperialism to the Cold War.

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9781916932029

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Reviews

'To reach Foulness Island, you have to go east, beyond the hard edge of Essex. It’s a marsh at the end of the world, a low island of wild birds and high explosives, at once wide-open and closed to non-military visitors. It's a blasted wilderness where privatised missiles fly and the mud yearns to reach right up to your neck. It’s the perfect site for David Henningham’s fictional investigation: an eerily empty English wasteland that turns out to have stood at the centre of world history. Perhaps it still does. The church may be closed, but this book is full of revelations.' - Patrick Wright, author of The Sea View Has Me Again;'Foulness marks the arrival of an exciting new English novelist whose writing conjures the oppressive ambience of Le Carré, while extending the acute sensitivity to landscape and history of a W. G, Sebald or a Patrick Wright.' - John Mitchinson

Author Information

David Henningham is an artist, author and bookbinder. He is co-founder, with Ping, of Henningham Family Press. As publishers, their novels have been shortlisted for The Goldsmith’s Prize, Republic of Consciousness Prize, British Book Awards and longlisted for The Walter Scott Prize. Their artist’s books have been acquired by National Galleries Scotland, V&A, Tate, National Poetry Library and Stanford University. Their performance publishing shows have taken place in the British Library, BBC Radio Theatre, Christie’s, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Moscow (with the British Council), Bergen, Oslo, Ghent and Charlottesville VA. His writing has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Exacting Clam, Époque and The Developer. Foulness is David’s first novel.

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