Mozley's debut, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, is a rugged, potent work whose concentrated mixture of lyricism and violence recalls Cormac McCarthy. A taciturn giant of a man, a bare-knuckle fighter who is the "fastest and toughest... in Britain and Ireland," builds a house for himself and his two children in the Yorkshire woods, where "the soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up...