Between Hougham and Heaven

Lincolnshire, September 2022. Edward Sweeney has come to celebrate the seventieth birthday of two old friends from his student days. The countryside he finds charming, the late summer weather delightful and the company welcoming. Yet he arrives as a superfluous man, deeply infected by the farcicality of the age and the pessimism of the times. A superannuated university professor, he suspects the bookish wisdom which served him so well in the past and has lost those certainties which gave his life comfort as well as meaning. His paradoxical character, companionable but elusive, settled but uncommitted, rational but superstitious, has become disordered and he finds it difficult to resist the instinct to retreat from life.

Between Hougham and Heaven follows Sweeney's struggle to recover self-belief as he experiences a different world of village, pub, church and family in rural Lincolnshire. It explores the permanent questions of youth and age, tradition and modernity, faith and unbelief, commitment and indifference.

This is one in a series of novels featuring Edward Sweeney. The chronological order of the trilogy is:

• The Last Train to Hull
• Four Days in Villach
• Between Hougham and Heaven