The priest’s tale

Samantha Harvey is much rated by critics and those readers who have discovered her books, but deserving of a far wider audience than she has hitherto gained — so much so that just before Gaby Wood’s appointment as literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, the critic wrote a lengthy exploration of Harvey’s prodigious qualities, describing her as ‘this generation’s Virginia Woolf’. The reasons for her relative neglect are not complex: her work is deeply serious, her novels rarely mining the same seam; she has featured on numerous long- and shortlists but failed to scoop any major awards; and we don’t see her on the telly or at the head of newspaper columns.

I’m not sure about the comparison to Woolf, style-wise, but Wood’s judgment is bang on otherwise. And perhaps Harvey’s fourth novel will change that. Leaving aside its structural daring and prose at once precise and suggestive, it is an exhilarating mystery that pitches familiar tropes — a bereaved and fearful community, a melancholy investigator and his unsympathetic superior, a frantic search for deeds and wills — into the heart of late 15th-century rural England.