The Service Of Clouds

A novel that chimes with fear, romance and despair.At the far end of the long white gallery is a painting of a woman, in pale flowing clothes and lying on a sofa beside an open window. The muslin curtains billow out towards her like clouds. There is a touch of brilliant red, the ribbon on her hat. The rest is white, cream, palest grey. It is a painting which leads Flora on, beckoning her away from her childhood, her complaining, clinging mother, pert younger sister, and the confines of a small community, to a proud and self-reliant future. But later, this image is to prove the catalyst for the most signicant event in her life. Isolation, separation, solitude, betrayal. The shocks of life. The consolations and the beauty of death. A few piercing moments of absolute joy and perfect understanding. THE SERVICE OF CLOUDS is about these things, and also about love, loyalty, friendship, growing up and growing old.

“A beautiful and haunting novel about love, loss and the complexity of the human spirit. With delicacy and understanding, Hill offers a thoughtful portrayal, creating sensitive visions of the courage with which her characters face their existence”

Independent on Sunday

SUSAN HILL has been a professional writer for over fifty years. Her books have won awards and prizes including the Whitbread, the John Llewellyn Rhys and a Somerset Maugham, and have been shortlisted for the Booker. Her novels include Strange Meeting, I'm the King of the Castle, In the Springtime of the Year and The Mist in the Mirror. She has also published autobiographical works and collections of short stories as well as the Simon Serrailler series of crime novels. The play of her ghost story The Woman in Black is one of the longest running in the history of London's West End. In 2020 she was awarded a damehood (DBE) for services to literature. She has two adult daughters and lives in North Norfolk.

' The Service of Clouds contains echoes of Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse ...Hill is rare among contemporary writers...a meticulous, down-to-earth and strangely beautiful novel.' The Times 'In the bleak setting of a half-derelict hospital for the very old, Molloy, an ageing doctor, keeps watch with the dying...in holding the hands and wiping the faces of the dying, he is making amends for the fact that his mother died alone. Hill then draws us in another layer, and we follow the life story of Molloy's mother, Flor. Grave, fiercely independent yet vunerable, her character is formed by a series of bereavements and bitter disappointments...Skillfully structured, seamlessly blending past and present...Hill's lean, sharp prose and consistently detached tone creat a severe and rather beautiful book..that flows silkily off the page.' Independent 'Hill's new novel is intelligent and perceptive, cool yet more moviing, concerning the universal matters of love, death and the affairs of the human heart.' Scotsman 'A quietly passionate study of family tragedy written in luminous, impressionistic prose.' Michael Arditti, Independent , Books of the Year

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