News | Thursday, 19th October 2017

Award-winning writer and lecturer Andrew Michael Hurley’s second novel published

'Devil's Day' is the follow-up to the hugely successful 2014 book 'The Loney'

credit: Hal Shinnie

Devil’s Day, the second novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, Lecturer (Fiction) at Manchester Writing School, is released today.

Set upon the atmospheric moors of Lancashire, Devil’s Day is described as a “masterful tale of the lengths a community will go to hang onto the old rituals and stories that hold them together in a modern world where we need monsters and devils in order to measure our own goodness.”

Hurley won the Costa First Novel Award and Book of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards for his 2015 debut The Loney.

Originally printed by Tartarus Press as a 300-copy limited edition, it went onto be republished by John Murray and sell in twenty languages, and is now in development as a feature film.

'Markedly different'

He said: "Devil's Day is a novel about family, duty and landscape, but it's also a novel about storytelling and mythmaking and how important those things are in holding a community together.

"After the totally unexpected success of The Loney, Devil's Day was a difficult book to write, not least because I wanted it to be markedly different to the first. It eventually grew into its own skin and, like every new piece of writing, was an education in writing itself.

"I feel as though I've learnt a lot that I didn't know about structure, form and character, all of which I can pass on in the classroom."

Andrew Michael Hurley was interviewed last Sunday by The Observer about his second novel. 

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