Folk

A young lad fights through a gorse maze to win kisses from the local girls, only to be accidentally burned to death when the thorns are set ablaze. So begins this dark, often discomfiting debut which – in scooting between the lives of the inhabitants of a mythical island, Neverness – is more a collection of overlapping short stories than a novel. Gilbert’s sensuous prose conjures figures including a man born with a wing for an arm, and a girl who’s abducted by a water bull. But this series of mysterious images never quite adds up to more than the sum of its bewitching parts. Gwen Smith