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The Dig

The Dig

Author(s): John Preston

Location(s): Suffolk

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical

Era(s): Late 1930s

Location

Content

In the long hot summer of 1939 Britain is preparing for war. But on a riverside farm in Suffolk there is excitement of another kind: Mrs Petty, the widowed farmer, has had her hunch proved correct that the strange mounds on her land hold buried treasure. As the dig proceeds against a background of mounting national anxiety, it becomes clear though that this is no ordinary find … And pretty soon the discovery leads to all kinds of jealousies and tensions. John Preston’s recreation of the Sutton Hoo dig – the greatest Anglo-Saxon discovery ever in Britain – brilliantly and comically dramatizes three months of intense activity when locals fought outsiders, professionals thwarted amateurs, and love and rivaly flourished in equal measure

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Lead Review

A delicate evocation of a vanished era (Sunday Times )

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