Christopher Woodward describes the temporal vertigo ruins often inspire in us: ‘That strange sense of displacement which occurs when we find that, living, we cannot fill the footprints of the dead.’ In Ruins is a digressive and enthralling meditation on the evocative power of incompleteness and decay, and a brilliant exposition of the place of ruins in the Western imagination ‘This book is nothing short of a masterpiece,’ wrote Bevis Hillier in the Literary Review, ‘and I read it with the sort of pleasure one gets from having one’s preconceptions challenged by a rare intelligence . . . All this is achieved in a prose style of captivating bravura, sensitivity, allusiveness and evocative power.’

CCV | Paperback 288 pp. |ISBN: 9780099289555