It is early June 2025 and the headline news covers a spat between the world’s richest man and the the world’s most powerful man (Opinion | Musk and Trump’s Twitter Fight Reveals How Power Works Today – POLITICO). It is not edifying. Comparison with the finer specimens of humanity in its history speaks to another low ebb in our dismal times.
Take your mind to a place without squabbling multi-billionaires. Take your mind back 554 years to southern England.
It is 1491 and in the backwater village of Oakham, Somerset, Thomas Newman has been found drowned in the swollen spring river. Inward-looking, insular, and beset by superstition and myth, Oakham hides many secrets, amongst them the truth behind the death of Oakham’s richest man. The case draws the attention of the rural dean, who tasks John Reve, the village priest, with finding the truth. The narrative is told in reverse over the course of four Easter days.
Father Reve is a deep thinker who carries the soul of his parish on his shoulders. “We behave according to the creatures we are,” Reve pontificates at the end of the first section, “and I had no notion of what kind of creature they’d made me become.”
More than anything Reve wants to protect his town and protect his flock. But the dean has offered a significant pardon to the residents of Oakham to confess something, anything, hoping to lure the murderer into the confession box. And so Reve sits, the space cramped and dark, an ale at his feet, the dean all but commanding him to find someone to confess to murder, someone he can burn for the killing of Thomas Newman.
This is an intriguing historical novel offering profound character studies of people in medieval England.
This novel won the 2019 Staunch Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Check if ‘The Western Wind‘ by Samantha Harvey is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
304 pages in Black Cat
First published 2018
ISBN-13 : 978-0802128287
Samantha Harvey