‘’Year of Wonders’ carries
absolute conviction as an evocation of place and mood. It has a vivid
imaginative truth, and is beautifully written.’ Hilary Mantel
Our Book of the Month is Geraldine
Brooks's Year of Wonders, which describes the 17th-century plague that is
carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor.
As
villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice. Do they flee their
village in the hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay?
The lord of the
manor and his family pack and leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues
forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from
neighbouring towns and villages and prevent the contagion from spreading. His
oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself.
Cocooned from the
outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain
their humanity in the face of the disaster.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian / American author, and this was her first novel. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her second novel, 'March'.
