From Hannah Kent, the bestselling author of Burial Rites, comes The Good People, set in nineteenth-century Ireland and based on newspaper reports and a court case from the time.
Hannah Kent was born in Adelaide in 1985. Her first novel, Burial Rites, has been translated into nearly thirty languages and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), the Guardian First Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In Australia it won the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, the Indie Awards Debut Fiction Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier's People's Choice Award, amongst others. Hannah is also the co-founder and publishing director of Australian literary journal Kill Your Darlings. The Good People is her second novel.
Kent conjures up with exceptional intensity and empathy a world in
which folk beliefs hold as much sway over people’s minds as
religious faith . . . It would have been all too easy to present
this story as a conflict between rational enlightenment and peasant
superstition, but the main strength of Kent’s narrative is that it
avoids such a simple dichotomy. 'I have told you my truth,' Nance
tells the court during the trial scenes that provide the book’s
climax. Such is the power of Kent’s imaginative sympathy with her
characters that this becomes not merely the mantra of a deluded old
woman, but a moving statement of her continuing faith in her own
vision of the way the world works . . . The Good People is an even
better novel than Burial Rites — a starkly realised tale of love,
grief and misconceived beliefs
*Sunday Times*
Lyrical and unsettling, The Good People is a vivid account of the
contradictions of life in rural Ireland in the 19th century. A
literary novel with the pace and tension of a thriller, Hannah Kent
takes us on a frightening journey towards an unspeakable tragedy. I
am in awe of Kent's gifts as a storyteller.
*Paula Hawkins, bestselling author of The Girl on the
Train*
The Good People is, like Burial Rites, a thoroughly engrossing
entrée into the macabre nature of a vanished society, its virtues
and its follies and its lethal impulses. The Good People takes us
straight to a place utterly unexpected and believable, where amidst
the earnest mayhem people impose on each other, there is no
patronizing quaintness, but a compelling sense of the inevitability
of solemn horrors
*Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark (winner of the
Booker Prize)*
Beautiful . . . the setting and the characters drew me in
immediately and kept me completely absorbed
*Claire King, author of The Night Rainbow*
The Good People is a novel about how competing systems of thought -
religious, medical, folkloric and, eventually, legal - attempt to
make sense of the bad stuff that happens. Significantly, the novel
is set in a valley, a place cut off from the outside world. The
community – and the novel – feels claustrophobic. The characters
are trapped in their crucible of mutterings and gossip by a
combination of geography, ancestry and poverty. It is to Kent’s
credit that she never passes judgment on her protagonists’ beliefs,
even as they lead them to ever more extreme, even insane, behaviour
. . . Kent has a terrific feel for the language of her setting. The
prose is richly textured with evocative vocabulary – skib, spancel,
creepie stool . . . the overall result is to transport the reader
deep into the rural Irish hinterlands. This is a serious and
compelling novel about how those in desperate circumstances cling
to ritual as a bulwark against their own powerlessness
*Guardian*
Hannah Kent's second novel is a thorough study of the faiths and
rituals of a rural community, as well as a poignant portrayal of
grief
*Financial Times*
The Good People transports us to Co Kerry, west Ireland, in 1826 .
. . Kent doesn't just show us rural Ireland; she lets us smell it,
touch it and feel it too, from the heat of the turf fires to the
sharp, bitter smell of a woman, fresh in from the rain . . . The
Good People lies somewhere between Andrew Michael Hurley's gothic
The Loney and Emma Donoghue's latest novel, The Wonder . . . an
absorbing and imaginative novel about superstition and the old
ways
*Times*
An imaginative tour-de-force that recreates a way of perceiving the
world with extraordinary vividness . . . With its exquisite prose,
this harrowing, haunting narrative of love and suffering is sure to
be a prize-winner
*Daily Mail*
Hannah Kent has terrific form as a historical novelist - her highly
acclaimed debut, Burial Rites, set in a 19th-century Icelandic
village, was shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for
Fiction. This novel, based on a true story, is even better. As the
tale slowly builds, Kent creates an immersive, startlingly lyrical
portrait of a time when the borders between logic and superstition
were dangerously porous and where the Catholic church is determined
to strengthen its grip . . . thrillingly alive to the dynamic of
poor, close-knit communities, where fear of the outsider trumps
reason and compassion
*Metro*
Remarkable . . . Kent displays an uncanny ability to immerse
herself in an unfamiliar landscape and to give that landscape a
life - a voice - that is utterly convincing . . . a haunting novel,
shrewdly conceived and beautifully written
*The Australian*
A sensitively drawn tale of love, grief, and terrible loss
*The Age*
The Good People is a sensitively drawn tale of love, grief, and
terrible loss, set in a tiny Irish village in the early 19th
century . . . filled with descriptions of ritual and rhythm
*Canberra Times*
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