The way those past events, and their implications for the present and the future, are gradually and subtly revealed to us is a masterclass in understated writing.

Much of the action is in the shadow of events up to a generation earlier, events which are only hinted at. It takes quite a while to work out which, if any, of the narrators are reliable. It is not so much the events that carry the reader forward, as the voices of the various narrators who take turns to give their perspectives. The Listeners is set in the wartime years of the 1940s in rural Norfolk – in an area near to where I used to live, so I recognize the descriptions of landscape and wildlife that provide the staging for the events of the book. And yes, I know that sounds hyperbolical, but I mean every word. It is a treat, a gem, a perfectly-formed little treasure, like a beautifully crafted piece of work by a skilled artisan. I’m sad I’ve finished it – I eked out the last few chapters over several days, to put off the moment when it would be over.

But it has taken until last week for me to feel up to tacking new, more challenging fiction. These were safe, generally not graphically violent, with structures that were familiar and worlds which trundled along on their predictable tracks. Then, last summer, I started re-reading the Golden Age crime fiction collection on my Kindle (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham). I just couldn’t hack fiction.įor a year and a half I read only non-fiction. I had a large ‘to be read’ pile which included a number of fiction books by authors I knew I liked, but each one was closed and put aside after only a few pages.

It was as if the surreality of real life, with everything we took for granted suddenly swept away into an unknowable and dystopian future, seemed to make my brain incapable of coping with imagined realities. But the arrival of my signed copy of The Listeners was followed closely by the arrival of Covid and the first lockdown, and I suddenly found it impossible to read fiction. I know Ed Parnell, and have read his non-fiction Ghostland, so I knew his debut novel would be good. It grieves me that it took so long for me to get round to reading this book.

Edward parnell ghostland