Book reviews

The Western Wind Samantha Harvey

When the richest man in Oakham – a vividly imagined, late 15th Century Somerset village – is swept away and lost in the river one Shrovetide morning, it falls to priest John Reve to investigate his disappearance. In her fourth novel, Samantha Harvey, author of the Booker Prize longlisted The Wilderness, pours a modern style into her God-fearing tale of guilt and suspicion that sees Reve conduct most of his sleuthing from the discomfort of a rudimentary confessional.

Harvey’s novel eventually jumps back in time to reveal the truth behind Newman’s fate, but it is the steady unravelling of Reve’s absolute faith in the old ways that leaves the deepest impression.

8/10

Love After Love Alex Hourston

Alex Hourston’s second novel, Love After Love, is an intense domestic tale of adultery among the chattering classes. Nancy Jansen is a therapist with an idyllic middle-class family lifestyle and a disgustingly perfect husband. Only something isn’t right, and before long she’s embarked on an intense afair with Adam, a therapist and old college mate who now shares her offices.

Nancy likes to think she can keep everything going if she can just keep the different aspects of her life separate. But inevitably, the strands all start to get tangled up, and we’re drawn into an involving psychodrama as we wonder how the imminent crisis will resolve itself.

Though the book’s subject is a familiar one, it never seems formulaic or predictable, and we cannot but be absorbed because of Hourston’s sharply-observed characters, her economical scenes and her darkly evocative sentences.

7/10

The Heart Is A Burial Ground Tamara Colchester

Tamara Colchester’s debut novel, The Heart Is A Burial Ground, follows four generations of women in a single family: matriarch Caresse, her daughter Diana, Diana’s troubled daughters Elena and Leonie, and Elena’s six-year-old daughter, Bay.

The story revolves around Caresse, whose impact upon everyone she meets seems to have deep emotional and psychological bearing – for better and worse. Evoking the writing of authors Kate Atkinson and Tessa Hadley, Colchester’s self-indulgent characters almost seem aware that their lives will end up in a novel, and you’ll be swept along with their fanciful lives across centuries and continents.

5/10