The Pinecone - Tapa dura

'Absorbing, illuminating and brilliantly crafted.' --Salley Vickers, Observer Books of the Year
'Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone is about the language of carving, objects and containing ideas. It is the story of Sarah Losh, a north country heiress in the early 19th century, forceful, learned, independent, who built a church full of fascinating images. The tale is mysterious because Uglow worked with almost no manuscript remains and scrupulously invented nothing. She has turned this central silence into a kind of force by describing stones, glass, things constructed, so precisely that they become not exactly alive but strangely present on the page ... I don't know another book that feels quite like this one.' --A. S. Byatt, New Statesman Books of the Year
'Most lives reheat familiar cabbage. It is a brave biographer who resurrects an unknown or forgotten character. Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone is the fastidious but fascinating story of Sarah Losh, a Cumbrian heiress, spinster and visionary, who used her alkali fortune to build a stubbornly individual church at Wreay in 1842, which kicked off the Byzantine revival.' --Nicholas Shakespeare, Telegraph Books of the Year

In the village of Wreay, near Carlisle, stands the strangest and most magical church in Victorian England. This vivid, original book tells the story of its builder, Sarah Losh, strong-willed and passionate and unusual in every way. Born into an old Cumbrian family, heiress to an industrial fortune, Sarah combined a zest for progress with a love of the past. In the church, her masterpiece, she let her imagination flower - there are carvings of ammonites, scarabs and poppies; an arrow pierces the wall as if shot from a bow; a tortoise-gargoyle launches itself into the air. And everywhere there are pinecones, her signature in stone. The church is a dramatic rendering of the power of myth and the great natural cycles of life and death and rebirth. Sarah's story is also that of her radical family - friends of Wordsworth and Coleridge; of the love between sisters and the life of a village; of the struggle of the weavers, the coming of the railways, the findings of geology and the fate of a young northern soldier in the Afghan war. Above all, though, it is about the joy of making and the skill of local, unsung craftsmen.