Helen Gordon – författare

For fans of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Landfall is a clear-eyed, witty and warm debut novel by former Granta editor Helen Gordon, that marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.Alice Robinson, art critic for a magazine so fashionable it's just gone out of business, finds herself agreeing to housesit for her parents. Moving back home to a suburbia she thought long behind her, she finds herself reconnecting with a different landscape, a fraught and painful past.For everywhere Alice turns she finds traces of her sister, who went missing as a teenager. Can she stop her old life intruding on the present? Should she even try? What does Alice's new future look like?'An intriguing novel . . . a hipster version of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing' Metro'A memorable novel. I loved the pace and verve of Alice's voyage from Shoreditch to suburbia, and the unexpectedness of the story as it swerves past the familiar into a dangerous and beautiful unknown' Helen Dunmore'Compulsively readable' Independent on Sunday'Fine writing . . . wrapped in an arresting evocation of timelessness' Guardian'Brooding and haunting' Tatler'Uplifting, witty, wonderfully unsettling' Psychologies'Beautifully descriptive, with a cliff-hanger finale' Easy LivingHelen Gordon was born in 1979 and grew up in Croydon. She currently lives in east London and is a former associate editor of Granta magazine. Landfall is her first novel.

''Astounding ... To call this a "history" does not do justice to Helen Gordon''s ambition'' Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph ''Awe-inspiring ... She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity'' Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward, Mail on Sunday The story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it''s there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative. Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world''s most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples. At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn''t quite as it seems.

'Astounding ... To call this a "history" does not do justice to Helen Gordon's ambition'Simon Ings, Daily Telegraph'Awe-inspiring ... She has imbued geological tales with a beauty and humanity'Shaoni Bhattacharya-Woodward, Mail on SundayThe story of the Earth is written into our landscape: it's there in the curves of hills, the colours of stone, surprising eruptions of vegetation. Wanting a fresh perspective on her own life, the writer Helen Gordon set out to read that epic narrative.Her odyssey takes her from the secret fossils of London to the 3-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from a state-of-the-art earthquake monitoring system in California to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes in Naples. At every step, she finds that the apparently solid ground beneath our feet isn't quite as it seems.

'The Meteorites conjures a small epiphany about our own place in the universe' The Sunday Times'Stunning and riveting' Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place'Absolutely fascinating' Mark Haddon'Dazzling' Financial TimesFrom your window you can see the stars and distant planets: light years away, it's easy to think that our existences and theirs will never intersect. Yet meteorites - mysterious, irregular rocks of sometimes immense value - connect us with the vastness of the universe. They may have brought the first life to our planet, and today they still reveal extraordinary scientific insights.Helen Gordon reveals the fascinating stories of fallen meteorites and the lives they've touched - from collectors to kings, scientists to farmers. She meets amateur astronomers and gem dealers, goes meteorite hunting across rooftops and learns what objects moving through space can tell us about the fragility of life on Earth.