Cloudless

Deeply moving ... Set on a hill farm in north Wales, the cycles of the natural world are rendered with the same power and exactitude as the human dramas of love and loss which exist alongside them. Beautiful and unflinching, Cloudless is a phenomenal debut.

Deeply moving ... Set on a hill farm in north Wales, the cycles of the natural world are rendered with the same power and exactitude as the human dramas of love and loss which exist alongside them. Beautiful and unflinching, Cloudless is a phenomenal debut.

Dastur writes with devastating compassion on what it means to be human, the tension between duty and desire which eats at us all

A tender portrait of a family struggling to stay afloat ... It’s beautifully written and the characters are very well drawn. The tension builds slowly as each of their emotional landscapes becomes increasingly difficult to bear ... A very assured debut

Cloudless attends to the bonds we have to family, landscape, global politics with uncommon attention, extraordinary depth and lightness of touch. It's hard to believe this assured and sensitive novel is a debut

Rupert Dastur's beautifully written, introspective and lyrical debut is perfect for fans of family dramas, rural fiction and contemplation of the human condition. He renders his characters with unflinching observational power... Dastur is especially sensitive about the ways in which our betrayals of each other are often betrayals of ourselves, indicative of our own frailty as opposed to any malice, and this lends his story a warmth and humanity that left me feeling optimistic in spite of a complex bittersweet ending

Dastur skillfully weaves a story about love and war, family and nation, addiction and recovery, all with intelligence, sensitivity and a huge heart . A must read

Elegant and quietly devastating ... Dastur affords his characters such grace and complexity that they transcend fiction to become people you feel that you know and care for deeply

A beautifully written exploration of family breakdown set against the background of the Iraq war ... A sparkling debut.

An accomplished, breathtaking debut novel that sweeps the reader into the hearts and minds of its characters. With muscular, precise prose, Dastur lays out the complexities hidden in the heart of a family ... The narrative is so superbly crafted and the characters so thoroughly integrated within their own landscape that the novel feels like a meeting of minds ... A wonderful work of craftsmanship and a complex, beautifully written debut

This is gritty and unflinching and a realistic examination of survival and I loved it. So well written, the language is economical and the quality of the writing is so strong... It really does feel in its 298 pages that not a word or idea is wasted.

Rupert Dastur is a writer, editor and publisher. His writing has been shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize, and won the Federation of Scottish Writers Award in 2018. He is the founder of TSS Publishing and director of The Cambridge Prizes for Short Fiction, and he runs writing workshops across the UK and abroad. He read English at Cambridge University and lives in London. Cloudless is his debut novel.