Review of "The Western Wind" by Samantha Harvey

Remarkable book by the author of "Orbital", and almost nothing like that. It's a first-person narrative set in the late C15th, in which the narrator is the parish priest in a not-very-prosperous west country village. It's of course embedded in the world of medieval Christianity, a mixture of theology and folk-superstitions and lots in between (how would you characterise the belief that someone who dies "un-shriven" cannot enter heaven?). There's a suspicious death that's being investigated by an outsider, a rural dean who is in effect the narrator's boss. 

What makes it quite so special is the narrative structure. It takes place over four days, but as readers we experience them in reverse order, so that the narrative really unfolds, but in an unexpected way - we learn gradually that what we think we have "seen" is actually something very different. 

Definitely worth a read. We listened to it as an audio book first, and I didn't get the structure properly until I actually read a paper copy.