He doesn’t just have them speak in broken sentences, but he messes with them on the page, creating an overlapping chorus. Porter takes those village voices and plays with them. This is one of the best novels you might never have heard of. The book is full of wonderful names: Bob Milk Cart, Little Owen the Coal, and the oxymoronic Mrs Jones the New Policeman. He faces terrible losses, and he eats many slices of bread and butter. Lyrical and sometimes mystical, its unnamed narrator goes out one moonlit night and remembers his past. This is Welsh village life with all its death, desertion, gossip, madness and joy. One Moonlit Night by Caradog Prichard ( Un Nos Ola Leuad, translated by Philip Mitchell) Like the rest of Comyns’ novels, it has a brilliantly naive voice and plenty of black humour.ģ. This English village in 1911 is full of eccentrics, many of whom are going mad from a strange epidemic. And so it continues with everything slightly off-balance. This weird and uncomfortable novel starts with a flood where the ducks come swimming in through drawing-room windows of the Willoweed family’s house. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns Though the women in this novel are not the main characters, their daily duties, together with the village rituals, will keep you captivated.Ģ. Though really there is no decision to make: Okonkwo, the greatest wrestler across nine villages in Nigeria in the 1890s, is a man who regularly mistreats his wives and children, but when a white man comes on a bicycle and many more follow, they are even more brutal.

Here are some of my favourites.Īchebe writes his characters, no matter how reprehensible, without judgment – letting the reader decide. The best novels with a village at their heart will play with our assumptions about village life and not make even the most gossipy old woman a cliche.

Unsettled ground claire fuller review