Tom Williams

This Blessed Plot

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

By

Bloomsbury 224pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Magnus Mills’s new novel explores the interaction between man and land on a comically miniature scale. The entire story is set within a single field positioned deep in the bend of a river and bounded by wilderness to the north. There is nothing to distinguish this space from the neighbouring fields, yet it inspires reverence in its sparse group of inhabitants – none more so than Mills’s idealistic narrator, who revels in the tranquillity of ‘the Great Field’ and regards it as ‘a place chosen especially to fulfil its purpose; a place where momentous events would unfold and come to fruition’.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us