Description

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.

In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill and writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a cult following. Two decades later, some teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor.

Tom Cox’s masterful debut novel synthesises his passion for music, nature and folklore into a psychedelic and enthralling exploration of village life and the countryside that sustains it.

Publisher Review

‘A glorious ramble … This is an epic, oddball soap opera soundtracked by folk music, birdsong and the rattle of hedgerows against car windows … Its psychedelic tangle suggests that our short lives can nourish the landscape, if we watch our step’ – Guardian ‘Tom Cox is a master of effortless, fluid storytelling and Villager is alive with both gnawing edge and Cox’s signature flavour of clipped, pragmatic humour which is perfectly juxtaposed with the unbounded imagination of Villager’s world. It is a thrilling, comforting and entirely unique read, challenging the reader’s sense of both what is familiar and what is alien. It’s tender and dark and strangely comforting. I loved it’ – Laura Kennedy, Irish Times/Sunday Times ‘Villager is a marvellously inventive and imaginative fiction. A tremendous novel’ – William Boyd ‘An exquisitely detailed, many-voiced tale of people, place and folklore … a communication with lost voices rich in wonder, longing and exalted psychedelic flight’ – Mojo ‘Tom is such an original mind, and brave in his approach to writing, so it’s no surprise at all that he has written a novel that surprises, delights and fizzes with imagination’ – Sathnam Sanghera ‘An extraordinary book … [Tom Cox] is policing that interesting boundary between what is folklore, what is actual history, and what is natural history’ – John Mitchinson, Backlisted podcast ‘I was swept along in this novel’s current, watching a landscape unfold to reveal the lives hidden in its crevices. A joyous tumble of animism, love, music and mystery that beautifully balances awe and irreverence: Villager left me with a sense of an ancient longing that is hard to shake off’ – Zoe Gilbert, author of Folk