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.
On a remote and unforgiving island lies a village unlike any other: Neverness. A girl is snatched by a water bull and dragged to its lair, a babe is born with a wing for an arm and children ask their fortunes of an oracle ox. While the villagers live out their own tales, enchantment always lurks, blighting and blessing in equal measure.
Folk is a dark and sinuous debut circling the lives of one generation. In this world far from our time and place, the stories of the islanders interweave and overlap, their own folklore twisting fates and changing lives.
A captivating, magical and haunting debut novel of breathtaking imagination, from the winner of the 2014 Costa Short Story Award.
My Review
I know the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” but this cover is stunning and it caught my eye straight away leading me to find this little treasure of a book and what’s even better is that the book is just as stunning on the inside as it is outside.
It isn’t very often we come across a truly unique book but that is just what I found when I came across this book.
Neverness, an isolated island full of magic and folklore, where each character’s life is inextricably entwined with the island’s mythology in the forms of family traditions, long-buried secrets or ancient legends.
Every chapter is told by a different character each with their own stories that read like a collection of short stories that all interwoven. Sometimes one character is a child in one story, and then as an adult in another. Some of the earlier stories that have been read then show themselves later in other stories, as rumours in some or legends in others. With the beginning and the end of the book being connected it brings the whole magical island of Neverness and its occupants together perfectly.
Zoe Gilbert has created her own magical and often haunting world blending folklore, fairy tales and magical realism into an absolutely enchanting debut novel.
If you are a lover of mythology, fairy tales and folklore then this book is for you.
A stunning book both inside and out – simply magical!
Folk is out now in Hardback and e-book format and the paperback edition will be released on February 7, 2019.
A massive thank you to the author Zoe Gilbert, publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc and NetGalley for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest and independent review.
Inked Book Review’s 