The Good People
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pan Macmillan
Published:7th Sep '17
£10.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
From Hannah Kent, the bestselling author of Burial Rites, comes The Good People, set in nineteenth-century Ireland and based on newspaper reports and a court case from the time.
**Devotion, the new novel from Hannah Kent, is out now!**
'Exquisite' – Daily Mail
Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize
One woman's mercy is another's murder . . .
Ireland, 1825. Nóra, bereft after the sudden death of her husband, finds herself alone and caring for her young grandson Micheál. Micheál cannot speak or walk and Nóra is desperate to know what is wrong with him. What happened to the healthy, happy grandson she met when her daughter was still alive?
Mary arrives in the valley to help Nóra just as the whispers are spreading: stories of unexplained misfortunes, of illnesses, and rumours that Micheál is a changeling child who is bringing bad luck to the valley. Nance has lived in the valley all of her life. She is a healer who knows how to use the plants and berries of the woodland; she understands the magic in the old ways. And she might be able to help Micheál . . .
As these three women are drawn together in the hope of restoring Micheál, their world of folklore and belief, of ritual and stories, tightens around them. It will lead them down a dangerous path, and force them to question everything they have ever known.
'A starkly realised tale of love, grief and misconceived beliefs' – Sunday Times
'An imaginative tour de force . . . exquisite' – Daily Mail
Exceptional . . . The Good People is an even better novel than Burial Rites — a starkly realised tale of love, grief and misconceived beliefs * Sunday Times *
Lyrical and unsettling . . . A literary novel with the pace and tension of a thriller . . . I am in awe of Kent's gifts as a storyteller. -- Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
An imaginative tour-de-force that recreates a way of perceiving the world with extraordinary vividness . . . With its exquisite prose, this harrowing, haunting narrative of love and suffering is sure to be a prize-winner * Daily Mail *
Kent has a terrific feel for the language of her setting. The prose is richly textured with evocative vocabulary . . . A serious and compelling novel about how those in desperate circumstances cling to ritual as a bulwark against their own powerlessness -- Graeme Macrae Burnet * Guardian *
Hannah Kent's second novel is a thorough study of the faiths and rituals of a rural community, as well as a poignant portrayal of grief * Financial Times *
The Good People lies somewhere between Andrew Michael Hurley's gothic The Loney and Emma Donoghue's The Wonder . . . an absorbing and imaginative novel about superstition and the old ways * The Times *
A thoroughly engrossing entrée into the macabre nature of a vanished society, its virtues and its follies and its lethal impulses . . . utterly unexpected -- Thomas Keneally, Booker Prize-author of Schindler's Ark
Beautiful . . . the setting and the characters drew me in immediately and kept me completely absorbed -- Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow
An immersive, startlingly lyrical portrait of a time when the borders between logic and superstition were dangerously porous . . . thrillingly alive * Metro *
Remarkable . . . Kent displays an uncanny ability to immerse herself in an unfamiliar landscape and to give that landscape a life - a voice - that is utterly convincing . . . a haunting novel, shrewdly conceived and beautifully written * The Australian *
A sensitively drawn tale of love, grief, and terrible loss * The Age *
The Good People is a sensitively drawn tale of love, grief, and terrible loss, set in a tiny Irish village in the early 19th century . . . filled with descriptions of ritual and rhythm * Canberra Times *
- Long-listed for Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017 (UK)
ISBN: 9781447233367
Dimensions: 197mm x 129mm x 28mm
Weight: 266g
400 pages