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Based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village," in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, a tainted bolt of cloth from London carries bubonic infection to this isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners. A visionary young preacher convinces the villagers to seal themselves off in a deadly quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. The story is told through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith, the vicar's maid, as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As the death toll rises and people turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna emerges as an unlikely and courageous heroine in the village's desperate fight to save itself.… (more)
caittilynn: I couldn't find the title listed in English, but the Horseman on the Roof tells the story of a young man traveling through the Provence region of France when there is an epidemic of cholera and he is suddenly forced to deal with death, opportunism and fearful townspeople.… (more)
wordcauldron: A girl who outlives her parents during an influenza outbreak and encounters a deceitful plan by a couple that lost their daughter during the same outbreak.
wordcauldron: Informative and intriguing university-level lecture about the plague. Sort of a micro history. Good for those who want some non-fiction about this topic!
The novel's narrator is Anna, a young widow with two children. Anna lost her husband to a mining accident (the region is known for lead mining). To make ends meet, Anna takes in a border who is a tailor. He has brought with him bolts of cloth from London that are infected with fleas bearing the plague. The plague quickly spreads throughout the village. The local rector persuades the villagers to self-impose a quarantine. Anna serves as a house maid to the rector and becomes close to Elinor, the rector's wife. Elinor reveals a shocking incident in her young life involving a self-induced abortion of a pregnancy from a jilting lover. Anna knows two eccentric women who are healers of a sort and have a garden with many exotic plants and herbs. After the two healers are accused of witchcraft and are killed by a mob, Elinor and Anna cull the garden for salves and potions they use to alleviate the suffering of the stricken. Elinor is highly educated and is familiar with the works of Avincenna, a Muslim pioneer in medicine. Elinor had taught Anna to read as she recognized that Anna is very intelligent.
The novel uses an actual plague village from 1666 to tell the story. The horrors of the plague are vividly described. There are hundred of deaths, sometimes entire families. The plague brings out the best and worst of people. Anna's father and step mother are particularly repulsive. He is a drunkard who becomes a grave digger who extorts the families of the dead for his services, at one point he attempts to bury a boy alive. For this, he suffers a gruesome death at the hands of the outraged villagers. Anna's step mother loses her mind and in a frenzy unintentionally strikes Elinor with a knife killing her.
The plague runs its course. While still grieving Elinor, Richard has relations with Anna. He tells her that he was never intimate with Elinor, justifying his withholding of relations as her deserved atonement for her sin of aborting her baby. This shocks Anna and she withdraws from him. Anna encounters Elizabeth, the daughter of the local nobility. Elizabeth says her mother soon to die from a labor turned bad. Anna has had some experience as a midwife and goes to the Bradford estate to find that there has been an intentional effort to hasten the mother's death. After she successfully delivers the infant she observes Elizabeth trying to drown the new born. Her mother's pregancy was the result of an adulterous affair bringing shame on the family. Anna is falsely accused of taking jewels and, with the new born girl, flees. As she is being pursued she takes a ship which ultimately lands in Oman. She is taken in by Ahmen Bey, who, like Avincenna, is renowned for his advances in medicine. She becomes one of Bey's wives and bears his child. She becomes a medicine person, particularly for women who are not comfortable with male doctors.
The novel is well-plotted. The author has researched the effects of the disease. The descriptions of the sickness and violence are quite strong. ( )
This was a great read, though pretty heavy and more than slightly depressing. Not one to read if you are going through a rough patch, unless that sort of thing helps you out of it! ( )
The Black Death has always intrigued me, and this book was wonderful in how it explored the emotions attached to plague and the spreading of disease. The characters are especially enthralling, no doubt partly because they are based on real people. Highly recommend to those interested in history and social challenges brought on by disease. ( )
I came to this book by an NPR article discussing pandemic lit. It's a fictionalized tale of the real English town that, struck by plague in 1665, chose to sacrifice themselves by quarantining the town in hopes of preventing the spread of disease to their neighbors.
At least, that's the framework for the story, but the real story is its characters and how they respond to the crisis, how they endure or find strength or break as they lose their neighbors and loved ones. How for some, it's business and opportunism as usual as they use legal means to take a valuable mine from an orphaned child because her dead father can no longer work it or defend it, or price-gouging for grave-digging services when the church graveyard is full and there is a shortage of able-bodied men. How the taverns are always full and the fearful mob inevitably looks for witches to burn.
But it's also the story of neighbors looking out for each other, of a mother rising above the grief of her lost children to care for the dying and deliver the new babies when the doctors flee the town, of the religious leaders look past their fundamental differences to provide leadership to people in need, how a pastor and his wife work tirelessly to minister to the whole town, good or evil of spirit, deserving and undeserving.
There are some odd twists at the end that surprised and angered and disappointed me, but overall the story had me fascinated throughout.
Audiobook via Overdrive, and I strongly recommend you do NOT do this one on audio, because it's read by the author who may be a very good writer but is a terrible narrator, and yet I was so engaged with the story that even her droning voice couldn't put me off. ( )
Discriminating readers who view the term historical novel with disdain will find that this debut by praised journalist Brooks (Foreign Correspondence) is to conventional work in the genre as a diamond is to a rhinestone. With an intensely observant eye, a rigorous regard for period detail, and assured, elegant prose, Brooks re-creates a year in the life of a remote British village decimated by the bubonic plague.
O let it be enough what thou hast done, When spotted deaths ran arm'd through every street, With poison'd darts, which not the good could shun, The speedy could outfly, or valiant meet.
The living few, and frequent funerals then, Proclaim'd thy wrath on this forsaken place: And now those few who are return'd agen Thy searching judgments to their dwellings trace.
- From Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666, by John Dryden
Dedication
For Tony Without you, I never would have gone there.
First words
I used to love this season.
Quotations
Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss.
God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how He can test us so.
And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.
Inasmuch as he knew what love meant, he knew he loved me, and all the more so when I gave him the boys.
This was no stealthy retreat. The Hall hummed like a struck hive.
Before sunset, no less than four families were visited so, by deaths that reached across generations, snatching children and parents with the same dread hand.
I set my morning to the rhythmic thump of my own knife, and its tattoo became, to me, the hopeful music of healing.
When he hefted his sack and went on, I stood and stared after his retreating back, wondering what kind of ill thing my good intentions might have hatched.
In his callousness, he would knock upon the doors of the ailing, saying if they wanted a grave he would dig it then and there or not at all. And so a person who yet lived would lie in his sickbed and listen to the rise and fall of my father's spud. I think that his heartless behavior hastened more than one person into the ground.
Michael Mompellion's face was quiet, but his voice was so cold I thought it would blast my father like an ice storm.
The crowd was thickening now as yarn gathers itself on a spindle.
The storm that had threatened at morning blew in by early afternoon. It came from the northeast, in sheets of snow that marched across the far valley in separate leaves, like the pages of a letter whipped from someone's hands in a wind gust.
After Alun Houghton's gravelly voice, my words seemed weightless, carried away by the wind.
I wondered then if others had these fell thoughts, or whether I was drifting slowly into madness.
There had been fear here, since the very beginning, but where it had been veiled, now it had become naked. Those of us who were left feared each other and the hidden contagion we each might carry. People scurried, stealthy as mice, trying to go and come without meeting another soul.
It became impossible for me to look into the face of a neighbor and not imagine him dead.
We were sorely depleted already in trades of all kinds. Horses who threw a shoe went without since the death of the farrier. We were without malter and mason, carpenter and cloth-weaver, thatcher and tailor. Many fields lay covered in unbroken clods, neither harrowed nor sown. Whole houses stood empty; entire families gone from us, and names that had been known here for centuries gone with them.
Fear took each of us differently.
"None of us is master of himself as we should be in these times."
So John Gordon's flesh was mortified in death as in life, lying naked under the sky, left to the untender mercies of Nature.
But fear, as I have said, was working strange changes in all of us, corroding our ability for clear thought.
For every one of us who still walked upon the Earth, two of us lay under it.
Some days, even the effort of thought seemed burdensome.
And yet some memories cannot be rooted out like weeds, no matter how much one wills to do it.
Last words
Elinor clasps the other, and together we plunge into the jostling swarm of our city.
Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Problem CK : Date de première publication : - 2001-06-05 (1e édition originale américaine) - 2003-03-11 (1e traduction et édition française, Calmann-Lévy) - 2004-12-02 (Réédition française, Domaine étranger, 10/18)
Based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village," in the rugged mountain spine of England. In 1666, a tainted bolt of cloth from London carries bubonic infection to this isolated settlement of shepherds and lead miners. A visionary young preacher convinces the villagers to seal themselves off in a deadly quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. The story is told through the eyes of eighteen-year-old Anna Frith, the vicar's maid, as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As the death toll rises and people turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna emerges as an unlikely and courageous heroine in the village's desperate fight to save itself.
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When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer.
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice. Convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease.
But as death reaches into every housebold, faith frays. When villagers turn from prayers and herbal cures to sorcery and murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of family, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of a dangerous and illicit love. As she struggles to survive, a year of plague becomes, instead, annus mirablilis, a "year of wonders."
Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged mountain spine of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and hailed as an "astonishing re-creation of how it felt to be a victim and survivor of the year of wonders and horrors," the novel examines the collision of faith, science, and superstition at the cusp of the modern era. Exploring love and learning, loss and renewal, Year of Wonders succeeds as a spellbinding work of historical fiction and an unforgettable read.
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The novel uses an actual plague village from 1666 to tell the story. The horrors of the plague are vividly described. There are hundred of deaths, sometimes entire families. The plague brings out the best and worst of people. Anna's father and step mother are particularly repulsive. He is a drunkard who becomes a grave digger who extorts the families of the dead for his services, at one point he attempts to bury a boy alive. For this, he suffers a gruesome death at the hands of the outraged villagers. Anna's step mother loses her mind and in a frenzy unintentionally strikes Elinor with a knife killing her.
The plague runs its course. While still grieving Elinor, Richard has relations with Anna. He tells her that he was never intimate with Elinor, justifying his withholding of relations as her deserved atonement for her sin of aborting her baby. This shocks Anna and she withdraws from him. Anna encounters Elizabeth, the daughter of the local nobility. Elizabeth says her mother soon to die from a labor turned bad. Anna has had some experience as a midwife and goes to the Bradford estate to find that there has been an intentional effort to hasten the mother's death. After she successfully delivers the infant she observes Elizabeth trying to drown the new born. Her mother's pregancy was the result of an adulterous affair bringing shame on the family. Anna is falsely accused of taking jewels and, with the new born girl, flees. As she is being pursued she takes a ship which ultimately lands in Oman. She is taken in by Ahmen Bey, who, like Avincenna, is renowned for his advances in medicine. She becomes one of Bey's wives and bears his child. She becomes a medicine person, particularly for women who are not comfortable with male doctors.
The novel is well-plotted. The author has researched the effects of the disease. The descriptions of the sickness and violence are quite strong. (