The Service Of Clouds

May 14, 2025 11:44 PM

Author:Susan Hill

At the far end of the long white gallery is a painting of a woman, in pale flowing clothes and lying on a sofa beside an open window. The muslin curtains billow out towards her like clouds. There is a touch of brilliant red, the ribbon on her hat. The rest is white, cream, palest grey. It is a painting which leads Flora on, beckoning her away from her childhood, her complaining, clinging mother, pert younger sister, and the confines of a small community, to a proud and self-reliant future. But later, this image is to prove the catalyst for the most signicant event in her life. Isolation, separation, solitude, betrayal. The shocks of life. The consolations and the beauty of death. A few piercing moments of absolute joy and perfect understanding. THE SERVICE OF CLOUDS is about these things, and also about love, loyalty, friendship, growing up and growing old.

Reviews

A beautiful and haunting novel about love, loss and the complexity of the human spirit. With delicacy and understanding, Hill offers a thoughtful portrayal, creating sensitive visions of the courage with which her characters face their existence

—— Independent on Sunday

Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word. A word of warning, however: this one takes its time. Most readers are used to more watery offerings - this is thick, creamy and extra-rich

—— Carlos Ruiz-Zafron , Guardian

A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination

—— The Times

I discovered it at 15 and have been rediscovering it ever since. It's a profoundly enchanting world, but there are no elves or spells the magic is purely in the writing

—— Joanne Harris

I started reading it and did not stop.The images conjured up the most weird visions. Images that I had not encountered since absorbing my first introduction to the world of William Blake. It is a fantastic, almost surrealistic flow of vision

—— Ronald Searle

Not least among Mervyn Peake's virtues was his ability to be serious while involved in grotesque humour, and to be idiosyncratic while being completely professional. And that drawing was the essential of all he did

—— Quentin Blake

A wonderful story, a saga of somewhere strange that beats Tolkien into a cocked hat. Superb language and extraordinary imagination

—— Ranulph Fiennes

'The Drowning Girl' was inspired by Peake... Fushia was my dream. The idea of the infinite, of the unreal, of the innocence dying

—— Robert Smith, The Cure

Gripping debut

—— Glamour

I just finished the most fantastic gripping book, the Mistress’s Revenge by Tamar Cohen. I had to keep going to bed early to read it, it’s amazing!

—— Lisa Jewell

Joseph Conrad said that fiction is primarily a visual art; he would have loved Zachary Lazar's Sway for the thousand indelible visual details of a startling originality - and for Lazar's ability to shine a light into the contemporary heart of darkness

—— Edmund White

A hilarious and compelling read

—— Good Housekeeping

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