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Description
A captivating, magical and haunting debut novel of breathtaking imagination, from the winner of the 2014 Costa Short Story Award
Every year they gather, while the girls shoot their arrows and the boys hunt them out. The air is riddled with spiteful shadows – the wounds and fears and furies of a village year.
The remote island village of Neverness is a world far from our time and place.
The air hangs rich with the coconut-scent of gorse and the salty bite of the sea. Harsh winds scour the rocky coastline. The villagers' lives are inseparable from nature and its enchantments.
Verlyn Webbe, born with a wing for an arm, unfurls his feathers in defiance of past shame; Plum is snatched by a water bull and dragged to his lair; little Crab Skerry takes his first run through the gorse-maze; Madden sleepwalks through violent storms, haunted by horses and her father's wishes.
As the tales of this island community interweave over the course of a generation, their earthy desires, resentments, idle gossip and painful losses create a staggeringly original world. Crackling with echoes of ancient folklore, but entirely, wonderfully, her own, Zoe Gilbert's Folk is a dark, beautiful and intoxicating debut.
Product details
| Published | 07 Feb 2019 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781408884317 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Illustrations | black and white illustrations throughout |
| Dimensions | 198 x 129 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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I was thoroughly absorbed. Zoe Gilbert's invented folk-world is sensuous and dangerous and thick with magic
Tessa Hadley, author of The Past
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Folk is absolutely stunning. I loved it. With gorgeous, incantatory prose, it submerges you in a mysterious and utterly compelling world. Its illumination lingers long after you close the book
Madeline Miller, Orange Prize-winning author of The Song of Achilles
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Wild, domestic, powered by elements both natural and weird, Folk hauls us into a past where there's room for magic and for mystery. Give in and go there
Margo Lanagan, author of Tender Morsels
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An utterly tantalising new voice. With Folk, Gilbert casts a powerful spell, creating a world on the page that feels as old as the hills and yet exquisitely alive ... To read Folk is to find oneself rapt
Alison MacLeod, author of All the Beloved Ghosts
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As delightful and as dark as the collected Brothers Grimm. The village of Neverness is misted with secrets and sticky with magic. But as mystical as their circumstances might be the villagers are neither Cinderellas nor wicked-witches ... These tender portraits are, perhaps, Zoe Gilbert's greatest act of conjuring
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You
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Brilliant. It's visceral and savage, but the savagery always comes with a light touch ... The stories all have a beautiful fairytale quality that makes them look like they were spun out of one of Neverness's half-magic mists. It's a gorgeous, uneasy siren of a book
Natasha Pulley, bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

























