The Village by Marghanita Laski

The Village by Marghanita Laski

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There is something beyond delicious about finding a new author whose every word on every page is simply good. The Village by Marghanita Laski was something I picked up almost by accident, attracted more by the copy of Dimanche and Other Stories, and then chosen simply for the buy one get one free offer that the shop had on. But oh, what a treat such moments are, such little twists of fate when they give you an author whom you know nothing about and whose pages just give you the good stuff from day one, such small, immense moments!

The Village is the story of a reckoning. It is the end of the war and the inhabitants of Priory Dean are about to realise what it means to live at peace, marked by the wild shift in social dynamics and life-living that have characterised the war years. It begins with a cast of characters (to which, I must admit, my heart sunk: I can never keep track of people before I’ve met them) and then it moves swiftly on to introduce our key players: the Trevors and the Wilsons, polar opposites of the class spectrum and about to have their lives intertwined in an enormously unimaginable way.

This is one of those novels where you have to confess that nothing enormous really happens but in a way, that’s underselling it because ‘class’, in this society, is enormous. It marks everything and everybody in Priory Dean and god, small village life, I adore it. I adore the minutiae of this book and the way that Laski knows that things happen in villages which can leave an impact for years – the way that ‘so and so’ did this thing and so they’ll be known by that for generations, the way that lives are so very carefully managed outside the front door, the way that gossip will flow around these communities as easy as water down the stream. It is intimate and precise and very elegantly done. Laski’s a smart, smart writer and every inch of this is a treat.

View all my reviews