Folk

Zoe Gilbert

Fantasy

A captivating, magical and haunting debut novel of breathtaking imagination, from the winner of the 2014 Costa Short Story Award

The remote island village of Neverness is a world far from our time and place.

The air hangs rich with the coconut-scent of gorse and the salty bite of the sea. Harsh winds scour the rocky coastline. The villagers' lives are inseparable from nature and its enchantments.

Verlyn Webbe, born with a wing for an arm, unfurls his feathers in defiance of past shame; Plum is snatched by a water bull and dragged to his lair; little Crab Skerry takes his first run through the gorse-maze; Madden sleepwalks through violent storms, haunted by horses and her father's wishes.

As the tales of this island community interweave over the course of a generation, their earthy desires, resentments, idle gossip and painful losses create a staggeringly original world. Crackling with echoes of ancient folklore, but entirely, wonderfully, her own, Zoe Gilbert's Folk is a dark, beautiful and intoxicating debut.

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Published
February 2018
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Author

Zoe Gilbert

Zoe Gilbert is a fiction writer based in London, UK. Folk (Bloomsbury, February 2018) is her first novel. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and journals around the world, and have won prizes including the Costa Short Story Award 2014. She teaches creative writing at London Lit Lab and for other organisations including the British Library, Arvon Foundation and Mslexia, and is an associate editor at The Word Factory. She is completing a PhD on folk tales in contemporary fiction, and working on her next novel, all about woods.