The New York Times Book Review - Hannah Pittard
…beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient…Harvey's is a story of suspense, yes. It is a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets. But to read this novel is to experience a kind of catharsis. In John Reve, a 15th-century priest at war with his instincts and inclinations and at times even with his own flock, we find a kind of Everyman, and Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal.
Publishers Weekly
★ 09/03/2018
Harvey (Dear Thief) weaves a dazzling tapestry around loss and confession in late-15th-century England in this breathtaking novel. Thomas Newman, benevolent landlord and relative newcomer to the hamlet of Oakham, disappeared into the river on the Saturday before Ash Wednesday. Parish priest John Reve recounts the icy unnamed rural dean’s condescending investigation into the death across four days in reverse order, beginning on Shrove Tuesday, the day Newman’s shirt is found near the river. The dean urges Reve to report any information gleaned from the parish’s pre-Lent confessions to determine if Newman was killed, slipped, or committed suicide. During his investigation, Reve hears about the mundane mistakes, distressing habits, and intentionally aggressive mutterings from a number of possible suspects. There’s Lord Townshend, the landowner who has reluctantly sold holdings to Newman to pursue his quixotic cheese-making endeavors; Herry Carter, who thought of Newman as a father but is behaving as if he needs to atone; Sarah Spenser, who keeps confessing to the murder but may be seeking the relief of death from her wasting disease; and other shady types with suspicious reactions. Amid his attempts to deflect the dean’s intrusions and comfort his flock, Reve mourns his sister’s recent departure and recalls Newman’s friendly jabs against priestly intercession in favor of personal piety. Harvey’s final chapter unspools the truth of Newman’s death and Reve’s own surprising secrets. The lush period details and acute psychological insight will thrill fans of literary mysteries and historical fiction. This is an utterly engrossing novel. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
Praise for THE WESTERN WIND
Winner of the Staunch Book Prize
Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Named One of Waterstones Paperbacks of the Year 2019
“Beautifully rendered, deeply affecting, thoroughly thoughtful and surprisingly prescient . . . Harvey’s is a story of suspense, yes. It is a story of a community crowded with shadows and secrets. But to read this novel is to experience a kind of catharsis. In John Reve, a 15th-century priest at war with his instincts and inclinations and at times even with his own flock, we find a kind of Everyman, and Harvey delivers a singular character at once completely unfamiliar and wholly universal.”—New York Times Book Review
“Harvey is an intelligent and audacious writer, able and willing to take creative risks and perform stylistic feats. . . . This is a beautifully written and expertly structured medieval mystery packed with intrigue, drama and shock revelations. "The Western Wind" is no humdrum whodunit.. . . . Harvey plays with unreliable narration, probes memory and airs elusive or inconvenient truths. . . . We navigate the corners of Harvey's characters, all the while marveling at the intricacy of her puzzle and the seductiveness of her prose.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Ms. Harvey has summoned this remote world with writing of the highest quality, conjuring its pungencies and peculiarities… In this superb novel, time, like guilt, is a murky medium, at once advancing and circling back, and pulling humankind helplessly between its battling currents.”—Wall Street Journal
“The Western Wind brings medieval England back to life… By the time we find out how Tom Newman died, we’re less interested in a mystery solved and more intrigued by the fate of a long-gone place, a place that Harvey brings to life from its historical tomb.”—Washington Post
“The Western Wind is filled with the rich details of rural medieval life, but the unique structure of the story gives the novel a fresh and modern sensibility. In addition, Oakham’s remoteness and parochial village church is contrasted with the spiritual changes coming to both England and the rest of Europe, bringing to mind contemporary issues such as Brexit and the refugee crisis. Harvey…has written a densely packed historical novel that never seems dusty or precious, relishing in the psychological intricacies of power and faith but still crackling with suspense and intrigue.”—Bookpage
“A poignant tale of superstition and guilt… a sublime and heartrending story, perfect for readers who enjoy impeccably chosen language and a penetrating look at the human condition.”—Shelf Awareness
“Hardly a page goes by without a wondrous observation… Harvey regularly reminds me of Marilynne Robinson—the highest compliment I can pay any novelist.”—Commonweal Magazine
“Harvey weaves a dazzling tapestry around loss and confession in late-15th-century England in this breathtaking novel…The lush period details and acute psychological insight will thrill fans of literary mysteries and historical fiction. Utterly engrossing.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Harvey evokes the darkness of both winter and spirit with stark yet lovely imagery… This compulsively readable portrait of doubt and faith reveals, in small lives, humanity’s biggest questions.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A medieval whodunnit…the experience [Harvey’s] book engenders is less like reading a novel and more akin to time travel – something I’ve only previously encountered in the work of Hilary Mantel.”—Financial Times
“Startling and energizing…The Western Wind must be in the running for one of the year's best novels.”—The Spectator
“It is at once a literary detective story, an awkward confession, a study of a crisis in authority and faith, and a moving portrait of a tight-knit community’s dim awareness of encroaching threat.”—Sunday Times
“A rich and sumptuous delight . . . the language manages to be both luminously lyrical and endlessly sharp.”—Telegraph
“A medieval mystery from one of the UK’s most exquisite stylists.”—Guardian
“My book of the year . . . It is quite unlike anything else I have read . . . Samantha Harvey is not half as well-known as she should be . . . This, her fourth novel, deserves to break her through to a wider audience . . . The truly extraordinary thing about this novel is the way Harvey re-creates the mindset and beliefs of the medieval world, and makes the concerns of 500 years ago vivid and immediate.”—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
“Samantha Harvey’s prose is luminous, a wonderfully lyrical look at the way religious belief and pragmatism battle it out in the heart of a good man.”—Daily Express
“Set in the 1400s but never feeling dusty or distant, this astonishing book is at once a rollicking mystery and profound meditation on faith and existence.”—Alex Preston, Guardian (Best Fiction for 2018)
“Trumping all the above might be Samantha Harvey, whose relative anonymity should end if her next novel, The Western Wind, does as well as it deserves . . . A murder mystery, an acute dissection of class and money, and fabulously written.”—James Kidd, Post Magazine, South China Morning Post (Must-Read Books in 2018)
“The Western Wind is an extraordinary, wise, wild and beautiful book—a thrilling mystery story and a lyrical enquiry into ideas of certainty and belief. Surprising, richly imagined, gloriously strange—the best kind of fiction.”—Joanna Kavenna, author of A Field Guide to Reality
“Harvey is up there with the best writers working today. Here she makes the medieval world feel as relevant and pressing as tomorrow morning because—as always—she captures the immutable stuff of the human condition.”—Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall
Kirkus Reviews
2018-09-02
An imposing medieval mystery about a fearful religious community in the grips of secrecy.
In her fourth novel, Harvey (Dear Thief, 2014, etc.) has meticulously fashioned a historical mystery set in Oakham, a small, damp village in southwestern England, isolated by a river and buffeted by chilly winds. Its economy is weak, its villagers "scrags and outcasts." It's the year 1491. Wealthy, beneficent landowner Thomas Newman has talked about building a bridge. On Shrove Saturday eve he drowns in the river; the body is missing. Accident? Murder? Suicide? The dean of the local church, a man who had "a nose for the nasty," has instructed John Reve, a burdened young priest and our narrator, to solve the mystery quickly and punish the guilty. Is Reve reliable? Did he kill Newman? Reve laments that in "desperate times people do desperate things: they steal, they lie, they cheat, they despair, they forsake Mass." But this is no British cozy. Harvey has subtly crafted a complex narrative by adding another twist—the story goes backward. Reve's narration takes place over the "four days of Shrovetide before Lent," beginning on Tuesday, Feb. 17, and ending on Saturday the 14th, the night Newman died. Reve, as jury, will collect the evidence and, as judge, identify the killer. His court is his "little dark box," the "crude and childish" confessional. The villagers come to confess their sins, some even pleading, "I killed Newman." Reve listens, dissuades, and blesses—"Benedicite, Dominus, Confiteor"—with a "hefty pardon," performing his "endless, thankless job, this one of serving God." Harvey provides a wide array of intriguing, mostly pitiful suspects, each bearing some guilt, who live, Reve says, "in wariness at the whims and punishments of God." The story is told in pensive, faux medieval prose, with chapter titles that suggestively repeat back and forth as the overall narrative inexorably, circuitously unwinds from present to past.
A dazzling, challenging read but one worth taking on.
