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The Western Wind

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The Western Wind

By: Samantha Harvey
Narrated by: Nyasha Hatendi
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About this listen

Oakham, near Bruton, is a tiny village by a big river without a bridge. When a man is swept away by the river an explanation has to be found. The story is relayed by the village priest, John Reve, who, in his role as confessor, is privy to a lot of information that others are not. But will he be able to explain what happened to the victim? And what will happen if he can’t?

©2018 Samantha Harvey (P)2018 W. F. Howes Ltd Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Mystery Fiction Village

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An outstanding novel which conjures up late Medieval England in almost. palpable form. A must read.

Powerful, poignant and full of tender humanity.

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The narrator is well cast and the atmosphere is well done. The story has an interesting time line.

Great feel for the setting

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The central characters were brilliantly drawn. Strong story. Really clever on details of description. Recommend.

Rich in character and setting

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The Western Wind is certainly unusual with its central event being in 1491 when in the Somerset village of Oakham the body of Thomas Newman, a good, important and generous man, is found – separate from his shirt – in the river, the river for which the villagers are pleading for a bridge to end their isolation from the other better off villages around. Not everyone, including the rural dean, is in agreement with the bridge.
So who drowned Thomas Newman? The whole story is told by the contemplative parish priest John Reve who in his confession box is privy to many people’s secrets – as well as those in his own heart. Harvey creates the fifteenth century ways, mind-sets, beliefs, suspicions and a wealth of everyday tasks with great skill, as well as the powerful rhythms of the seasons, earth and winds. The central mystery unfolds as a succession of villagers claim their guilt in the confession box and as Reve sifts through them, a network of grievances, losses and quarrels underpinning those confessions are revealed.
The narration is appropriate. Nyasha Hatendi's voice is quiet, soft and gentle but I did find it trying after a while through no fault of his. I think I would have preferred to read this book than listen to it, because there’s plenty of beautiful language which needs to be savoured by slower reading or re-reading, and John Reve’s unvaried voice and tone would not have become so tiresome.

Much more than a medieval whodunnit

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The narration is beautiful and evocative, but the story is not very interesting and it is all a bit repetitive. There is a fundamental flaw in the Audible version which is that the chapters are not numbered and the day the action transcurs on is not clear, which is fundamental to follow the whole point of the novel. The reader is very good, though he mumbles a bit too much and it was difficult to understand well at times.

Beautiful writing but the story fails to impress

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Wow! what an amazing writer. Almost like reading poetry. Atmospheric
tense, just LOVED it. I can not recommend it enough.

Simply outstanding

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The first-person narrators is a modern voice in a medieval, spiritual world suspended between God and Nature. He is a most unreliable reliable narrator, he tells the truth almost unwillingly in a prose that reads like poetry.

Unusual poetic haunting

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The broken timeline sometimes had me struggling to piece together the book's sequence of events, but it works fantastically as a device for keeping crucial information back, information that will cause you to reevaluate what you think you know. The setting is beautifully realised too and the characters and sights of the medieval village of Oakham really come to life through both the story and the narration.

An enjoyably slow, winding, sometimes-eerie story

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Compelling opening which hooked. Beautiful language and reconstruction of a historical era and medieval mind. Poor plot stretched too thin with all the interest delivered towards the end because of the backward structure. extremely weak denouement which left me cheated having persisted through the whole novel. A beautiful written book which proved to be a disappointment. Well done on the research and the medieval Catholic mind though.

Glad I persisted but then...

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I found the premise intriguing, the story told backward by an unreliable narrator however at times I found it banal in its detail of the priest’s views. Well narrated, I would recommend.

Intriguing novel

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