Jonathan Barnes
Confidence Tricks
After the Second World War, England was gripped by a weird religious mania. The church-going majority turned on unbelievers, first ostracising them, then resorting to violence before, at last, instituting a programme of forced deportation. All sceptics and free-thinkers were sent into exile, shipped to a distant island. This, at least, is the alternative version of history that is imagined by Naomi Wood in her first novel, The Godless Boys, which begins – in a sly refashioning, perhaps, of the opening of The Wicker Man – with the arrival of a Christian girl upon this atheistic isle.
There are many stories that Wood might have told in her elaborate, fitfully plausible world but the one that she has chosen – about the consequences of a tentative love affair between the naive visitor and a secularist skinhead (‘there might be so much God in her veins
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Rivalries are intense and dangerous, and someone has to die.'
@NJCooper_crime on new thrillers by @HenryCPorter, @k_faulkner, @annafbailey, @mserinkelly, @JoelDicker, @AlanJParks, @whartonswords and more.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/april-2021-crime-round-up
This spring, give the gift of reading.
Give a friend a gift subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/
'It’s long been known that there is an optimum reproductive window and that women enjoy a considerably shorter one than men. For both sexes this window is opening and closing earlier than it used to.' (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-end-of-babies