What do we mean when we talk of ‘home’?

Given that I know the author, would I feel inhibited about reviewing her new book critically, I asked myself. But other than meeting her once at a party for two minutes, I realised that I know Clover Stroud only through her raw, ravishing memoirs and – like the rest of her 37,000 Instagram followers – the intimate and honest way in which she documents her life.

Perhaps more than any other writer, Stroud has taken the elegant, elliptical memoir and forged it into the genre of life writing. She has lived a lot of life. The Wild Other documented her mother’s life-changing brain injury as a result of a riding accident when Stroud was 16. In My Wild and Sleepless Nights she tackled the tribulations of raising five children; and after the early death of her sister, the circus impresario Nell Gifford, she took on her own grief in The Red of My Blood – a book about loss which nevertheless crackled with kinetic energy.

I confess I did wonder what else there was she could mine for another book. But in The Giant on the Skyline, Stroud has produced something exceptional: a mystical meditation on what home means and what constitutes belonging.

What happens when life dictates that you have to leave the place you feel hefted to? For Stroud, this is the ancient Ridgeway and chalk hills near Uffington in Oxfordshire, a place she has known since infancy and where she has spent the past ten years creating the family home. She extends their white, ‘squat, odd-looking house’ in the lee of White Horse Hill and fills it with colour and joyful clutter, with the aim of imbuing her children with ‘a powerful sense of place’ that would ‘drench into their little souls’.