‘A textured and bittersweet picture of a community that is both out of time and all too insistently in it.’

The aftermath of loss
Strange happenings in an ordinary Everyvillage

A few letters flop onto the mat, most with condolences, some with self-serving offers of help, one a stern notice from the traffic department, the outcome of a desperate drive to the hospital to hold Nick Fanthorpe’s still-warm hand. Paralysed by grief, his now widow Lucy has acquired the strangely clear (maybe the name is meant to suggest that) vision that comes with loss.

As the year unfolds in Lamley Green, an attractive but modest Everyvillage somewhere in the home counties, a cast of locals muse on their own and each other’s doings. A small literary festival is to come off in the local church, medieval but with twenty-first-century problems and currently in interregnum. The local Mr Chips is set to retire. Upwardly mobile incomers try to inveigle a place at the highly desirable CofE primary.

A few strange things are happening. Lucy’s cleaner finds a dinner receipt in Nick’s pocket. The date makes no sense to Lucy, and an associate called Beatrice unexpectedly comes into the picture, but off stage. A teddy bear is found with its eyes missing. A stand-in vicar delivers a sermon bleak enough to prompt a walk-out. A diamond stud goes missing in the new B&B, prompting a meltdown on Tripadvisor. By this point, most readers will be thinking of St Mary Mead or Midsomer, and awaiting the imminent discovery of a spinster/local artist/curate bludgeoned or otherwise done away with in the approved “cosy crime” manner.

But Graham holds her nerve and maintains an astonishingly sustained tone, achieving in the process that remarkable trick of making the ordinary, even dull, seem mysterious and freighted with meaning. Without sounding as if she has been to a creative writing class – hardly called for in a writer so experienced – she experiments with interior monologue, temporal jump cuts, Ivy Compton-Burnettish dialogue-narrative, even the epistolary novel, which these days subsumes email and Mumsnet: “Met my neighbour, skinny woman called Lucy, her husband died [tearful face emoji]. The front of her house is covered in greenery. I don’t want it damaging our wall”. If one notes, and this is a tiny spoiler, that the last word of the book is “happy”, be assured that there are a great many other emotions to meet on the way.

There has been much Booker-adjacent discussion of what constitutes a novel, what a novella and what a long short story. This one opts, a little surprisingly, for the middle term,
which, if any kind of diminutive is implied, seems overly modest. It’s not the quick read one is led to expect, but it presents a textured and bittersweet picture of a community that is both out of time and all too insistently in it.

Brian Morton, TLS, August 2026