The Tivington Nott
'This meditation on the condition of wildness, on being an outsider, is one of the most original pieces of writing of the year.' Melbourne Herald
'An extraordinarily gripping novel.' Melbourne Times
'Altogether brilliant. This man knows his hunting country.' Somerset County Gazette
'To sacrifice or be sacrificed: the outsider's stark choice in Alex Miller's darkly violent Exmoor. But, like the almost mythical Tivington nott, the outsider harbours a savage will of his own, an Odyssean instinct for self-preservation the natives cannot tame. What they plan as a bloody initiation becomes for him a liberatory rite of passage.' Paul Carter
Based on the lives of real people in Somerset on the borders of Exmoor, Miller tells his own story of a young labourer swept up in the adventure of riding second horse in a west country stag hunt. Finding himself in a closed social system in which he has neither status nor power, the young man identifies with the aberrant Tivington nott stag, which, despite its lack of antlers, has become a legend in the district for its ability to elude the hunt and to compete successfully with the antlered stags in the rut.
An extraordinarily compressed powerhouse of a novel, at once wholly original, gripping and mysterious. While The Tivington Nott is only Alex Miller's second novel, it has all the hallmarks of this two-times Miles Franklin winner.
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