Sometimes there are books I struggle to read in Kindle copy. I initially tried to read Lincoln In The Bardo on Kindle and failed miserably; I abandoned it half way and only picked up a hard copy several months later. When I read the hard copy, it was a completely different reading experience for me.

Unfortunately, I think I am having the same experience with Folk. I am struggling to read it on Kindle, potentially because there are numerous images inserted and they make the reading experience quite jarring? Because of the world Gilbert is painting, I need to be fully immersed to get into the swing of it (and keep track of the characters!) and something about the Kindle copy is stopping me from doing that… I know, from reading excerpts and other reviews, that this is the kind of book I would love (once I am in the flow of it), so I have purchased a hard copy.

I felt like the first story in this collection was a strong contender - interesting, strange, and magical. And yet I felt like it just kind of went downhill from there for me. I had trouble remembering the characters, so when they popped up in other stories I didn't really notice that much. Some of the stories lacked magic for me, and occasionally the (extremely beautiful) writing was so... lyrical as to be impenetrable.

An interesting collection, not one I fell in love with.

Folk is being marketed as a novel, but comes over more as a collection of short stories linked by the characters who live in the strange and remote island of Neverness. Zoe Gilbert plays with slightly different narrative voices to change perspective and the atmosphere of each chapter. This type of isolation means people spend their whole lives in close proximity. Because of this there is a sense in the characters of there being the same underlying frame of mind driven by the harsh environment and the traditions that bind them together, but that there is room for people to develop their own personalities. These are the subtleties the author brings out in her writing.
You are introduced to the island by approaching it from a wide focus, as if you are flying in low as you observe the different protagonists introduced in a type of coming of age ritual. This is one of the ways the inhabitants' lives connect to the land and shifting seasons. You feel the salt spray, smell the dank water-filled places, the reek of animals and smoke, as the natural world and island life is beautifully observed.
The writing really brings home the effort of living in such a remote and wild place, the type of hierarchies and interactions and the dependency on other people. Because everyone lives in such close proximity there is little privacy and children have to make sense of an adult world which is never properly explained to them. This can be particularly poignant and is something expressed well by the author.
The rhythm of the words and use of them makes Folk feel rather like a fairy story for adults, rather in the tradition of Angela Carter. The remoteness has brought about a way of life where there is a bleed between fey-type creatures who carry off maidens and those who might try to live the life of humans at great cost to them physically and mentally (think of Little Mermaid for adults). Although sometimes you just wonder whether there is a collective delusion to explain their harsh and sometimes tragic world to help the island folk come to terms with it. That not being sure really helps to maintain the tension through what is a skilfully sustained narrative which grows on you with each new story.

This is a mystical, rambling collection of folklore and fairy tales. The people live on the island of Neverness which is filled with magic, stories and a fair amount of fear.

I am not a fan of short stories so I would not have started it if that had been clear in the description. It was hard going, whilst the writing is descriptive and magical, I found myself scanning ahead to see if there was a point to it all.

In the end I found myself hanging out the washing and fiddling on the computer rather than reading - never a good sign, so I am afraid that I gave up.

Despite a confusing beginning, this is an enjoyable read and a refreshing take on the everyday through folklore. The writing, so to an extent, the story, can be hard to follow, but most of the time, it envelops you with its magic or seductive world.

Come back now, up the rocks that loom above the shore, to where the men and women of Neverness wait with their torches.
The sky above their heads is showing the first stars.The door of the day is nearly shut, but this is the hinge of the year itself. Days are shrinking, nights spreading. taste the fire and salt in the air.
The game has gone on long enough. The gorse wants burning. Her scent may be sweet when her blooms bake in the sun. She may hold their washing out to dry with her pinching fingers. but she has a temper, and she will skin you if you do her wrong.
The folk of Neverness want to hear her crackle, see her shrivel. They want to breathe her dying breath.


Wanted to read this as soon as I heard the summary – folklore and fantasy on a remote island where the magical becomes real. The cover is also beautiful and the synopsis made me think of Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick which I love.
When I started reading I struggled to follow at first, as each chapter follows different people on the island. Instead of a novel with a cohesive narrative, it seemed like a collection of short stories, linked by the folklore of the island, Neverness. Their stories, at first, seemed almost unconnected except through the appearance of certain characters on the periphery. However, as the book continued and the threads of the stories began to weave together, I was drawn into the fantastical, dark world that Zoe Gilbert has created.
This is not an easy read, but one I feel will benefit from rereadings. The author has clearly researched lots of different folktales and drawn on these when creating her world. At times I felt that I would have liked to have more of this world-building made explicit to help with pulling the stories together.
It feels like a bundle of threads which gradually pull tighter to reveal new facets and unexpected twists in each story.
Strange, magical and unsettling, highlighting the darker side of folklore and isolated island culture.


I ’ve heard it said, a strong wind can send a man’s mind sailing out of his head. it’s that way with horses. Perhaps a storm, the kind that shifts trees and blows out new caves, can do worse. A storm like we had, that autumn, might be enough to possess a person. it might send a girl’s sense skittering out of her head and leave only thunder in its place.
That would be one story. but i said i wouldn’t tell. i promised, and i’ve kept it. Nothing good would come of it, for folk would take the tale their own way.

What I liked: Remote island setting, fantastical language, the darker side of folklore.

Even better if: The narrative was more cohesive. I was drawn in by the end, but initially found this book very hard to get into.

How you could use it in your classroom: The writing is lyrical and poetic so I can imagine this book providing lots of points for discussion about the way language used can create a spell, gradually pulling the reader under the writer’s spell. However, I can’t imagine this being used successfully below A-level (age 17-18) so I would recommend it for your older readers.

Folk is a beautiful collection of short stories all set on a slightly mystical island called Neverness.

I’m not a huge connoisseur of short stories so I did go into this one with some trepidation but I just knew it was something I had to give a chance to, and I’m so glad I did.

I really loved the slightly creepy feeling of the book - as if the land was about to come alive and devour everyone at any moment. The people on the island follow a set of traditions, and we see little bits and pieces with every story such as the gorse bush hunt and the girls wanting to get a red kiss because the boys’ faces should be full of blood from the hunt. That was a great story to start off the book. It immediately sucked me in with the combination of emotion, feeling and gore.

I also loved that the characters aged throughout the book. In the first story, we meet many characters who are teenagers and in the last story, they are middle-aged with children of their own.

There was some magical realism in parts of the book like a character who had a wing instead of one arm, and then one old man called Guller who had the ability to send people into the minds of kites so they could fly.

This was a wonderful mix of tragedy, lust, love and a sense home and belonging. I really enjoyed it.

It took a while to get into this book, but once you’re in to it, it has you.

Sold as a novel but what feels like chapters of short stories, Folk is is an unusual story, telling tales of people who live in a village - all the stories are connected and flow brilliantly, but they all tell a story of the various people who live in the same place.

In these stories there’s an underlying dark mood, that works throughout the book, characters like Gertrude in the early chapters capture your attention and the Jack Frost story being told are some of the chapters that made me want to keep reading, the author weaves fairy tales and folklore really well in this book.

The writing is really poetic and the use of accents is actually a rare find in a book and where the book uses it, it works to deliver a touch of reality to the tale, like these are transcripts of the thing that has actually happened. It is a book rich in characters, if not maybe sometimes a few too many as you have keep track of them all.

Sometimes confusing but often enchanting, Folk is a book that works hard to keep your attention and it makes for a good read.

(I got an ARC from NetGalley for a honest review).

This collection of short stories is set on the island of Neverness. All of the stories are interconnected and characters reoccur as adults after they were in a story as children. We see how an experience in one story then becomes a cautionary tale or a fairytale in another. I loved the atmosphere in this book: menacing, dreamlike, happy, sad - like a fairytale really.
The language used was really very poetic. If you're attracted to this as a Fantasy reader, the language is weighted more on the 'Literary Fiction' side. I like both, and this didn't even occur to me until I read another review on Goodreads! There are plenty of Fantasy writers out there whose prose can be lyrical!
I also liked how the beginning and the end of the book were connected. Very clever, original writing, this is a short story collection that didn't feel to me as though they were short stories. Well worth a read! Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for sending me a copy of this gorgeous book to read.

This is a collection of short stories, each told from the point of view of one of the people living in the village of Neverness. As a literary device, I'd imagine this would be hard to pull off, but Zoe Gilbert makes it appear effortless and it works so, so well. It's also absolutely the sort of whimsical, dark fairytale sort of narrative that I love, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of it.

I was so very much looking forward to this; I even featured it on my list of most anticipated books. This collection of connected short stories is steeped in myth and folktale and set on an island with an absolutely gorgeous cover - how could I not read this? This sounds like absolute perfection. And the writing is lyrical and the atmosphere haunting. But it is also disjointed and lacks a sufficient emotional punch to be the great book it could have been.

As is normal with short story collections, there were some that worked better for me and some that left me cold. I absolutely adored Swirling Cleft with its rumination on family and loss and love. It was stunningly beautiful and left me aching. On the other end of the spectrum I did not like Fishskin, Hareskin and thought its rumination on postpartum depression stayed on a superficial level.

The language is absolutely stunning with vivid imagery and interestingly structured sentences (that sometimes border on inaccessible). Zoe Gilbert has a brilliant way of creating metaphors and storylines that feel familiar while still being original. Her original fairy tales feel just like that: fairy tales. Their matter-of-factness in their weirdness is spot on and brilliantly done.

I think ultimately my main problem was that the connections between the stories were not strong enough to give the individual stories the impact and depth I would have liked while the stories themselves often were not strong enough to stand on their own. I could never remember the characters between each stories because they mostly did not leave all that deep an impression on me and I think this lack of connection is what ultimately left me feeling mostly ambivalent about this book.

I received a copy of this book via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was... an experience, for sure.

Folk is a collection of short-stories set on the island of Neverness. Each of these short stories reads like a short folk tale, and every so often they interweave. The characters of these tales range from children to adults, and every story is a little weird and strange in that way that folk tales tend to be. Characters from one tale may appear or be mentioned in another, but despite this the book can feel a little disjointed.

I should note that it wasn't initially clear to me that this was a collection of short stories before I started reading. The blurb is a bit ambiguous in that regard, and so I was a little surprised and disappointed to find that there were no characters that would stick around long enough for me to latch on to.

I initially picked up this book because it seemed to be a literary book that had a touch of the fantastic. Being primarily a fantasy reader, who occasionally dabbles in LitFic, this appealed to me. Having read it though, I'd say that the scale is heavily-weighted to the literary side of things, and that fantasy fans should maybe steer clear.

Gilbert's Costa Short Story Award winning tale "Fishskin, Hareskin" is one of the first few stories in the book, and it's a reasonable introduction to her style of writing.

Some of the stories are definitely stronger than others. The very first - Prick Song - wasn't one that I particularly enjoyed. It involved a group of boys wading into a maze of thorns to retrieve ribboned arrows, the return of which will earn them a kiss from the archer. The story takes a bit of a dark turn, and this something which becomes a bit of a theme. In contrast, The True Tale of Jack Frost is a wonderfully spooky and atmospheric little folk tale that captures the imagination, with a young girl jealous of the winter sprite's affection for her sister.

The prose is very enjoyable, if a little inconsistent. It's lyrical for the most part, though not overburdened with metaphor. There are some flat patches, and these seem to coincide with the stories that I disliked the most. In the end, with no real characterisation, the prose was the main thing that kept me going.

This wasn't the book for me, but I can see others really enjoying it. If you're a fan of lyrical prose, literary fiction, and short stories with a dark tone and a touch of magic, this may be the book for you.

A brilliant read to start 2018. Folk is a collection of short stories (I've seen a few reviews describe Folk as a novel, perhaps it's being marketed as such?) centered on the inhabitants of a village called Neverness. Zoe Gilbert's stories are the perfect balance of weird and twisted but not so removed from reality that they feel unbelievable. I loved the structure of the book, it's not something I've seen done before in a short story collection. Each tale is inextricably linked to another. Each chapter is about a different character in Neverness, but they often reflect on events from previous stories and the villagers pop up in each others tales.

The thing I liked most about this book is the sense of place Zoe Gilbert creates over the course of her short stories. Neverness sounds like a magical place, shrouded in mystery, where folklore is part of their reality. I can picture the rugged landscape, the scent of fish hanging in the air, the roar of the waterfalls and the calling of the kites. It's a dark place with dark secrets and I loved it. Zoe's writing is rich and atmospheric, but not over the top. I really enjoyed it and look forward to reading whatever she writes next.

'Wherever Sil has been, though, there is a trace of waterweed in the air, of salt sea-fog and the insides of shells.'

As with any short story collection there are a few that I now can't recollect very well, but my favourites were Prick Song, Long Have I Lain Beside the Water and Verlyn's Blessings - the tale of man with a wing for an arm.

I believe 'Fishskin, Hairskin' was the story Zoe won the Costa Short Story Award for. You can have a read of this on the Costa Short Story Award website. Great if you want to sample her writing before purchasing.

Poetic short stories taking place in imaginary land of Neverness. It reminded me a bit of Angela Carter when I started reading and I got excited but unfortunately I found it difficult to engage with the text and ended up not finishing after reading 40% of the book.

There are too many characters and events going on but the setting and characters didn't take form in my head. It was impossible for me to keep reading without being able to materialise characters, places that was told on the pages. It's a shame as the book description was very interesting and I thought I'd like this book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Folk tells the story of the island of Neverness, steeped in folk myths, where girls can be snatched by water bulls, and babes are born with wings.

Every chapter is told by a different character, some from different generations, and each with their own story to tell. In this sense it's almost like a collection of short stories put together in a more cohesive manner than normal. They're all linked by the mythology of the island, and the characters seem to share an almost intrinsic link with their folk stories. Everything they do is a result of their believed 'fate' in magic and myths. The writing itself is also lovely, and the author clearly loves folk stories. The prose are beautiful and lyrical, if a little hard to follow at times. I had to keep my wits about me to follow the flow of the stories.

There's not really much world building either, which evokes a mysterious air to the setting, but left me confused as it took me a while to understand what was going on. The tales themselves, although told in this rather unique way of stories within a story were a little disjointed at times, and I didn't really get a feel for any of the characters because we often only see them so briefly. Although I did enjoy that sometimes we would see one character as a child in one story, and then as an adult in another. It added to the overall feel that the stories were timeless, and helped support the theory that mythology and folk stories are rooted in truth. It was cleverly done.

A great, unique concept from a debut novel, and well written. But I want stories I can follow more easily. However, I will definitely be looking out for more novels by Zoe Gilbert.

First of all, I'd like to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is a book that requires a pinch of patience. To be perfectly honest, it took me quite a while to get into it, but by the time I turned the last page, I had been absolutely bewitched by the incredible world Zoe Gilbert wove into being throughout the novel.

Before I go any further, it's also worth noting that this book is structurally and conceptually unlike anything I've ever read before. That was a large part of the reason why it took so long for me to get into the novel - going in, I knew that it was going to be a bit unusual, but I wasn't quite prepared for just how unusual it was going to be. But actually, that initial bewilderment was a part of the book's charm.

Folk is, in some ways, more of a collection of short stories than a novel - each chapter is told through the viewpoint of a different character, all of whom live in a village called Neverness on an isolated island. This is an island that breathes with magic and folklore, and each character's life is inextricably entwined with some aspect of the island's mythology, whether in the form of family traditions, long-buried secrets, ancient legends, or something unfamiliar and altogether different. Furthermore, time is the constant thread running through the entire novel, unspooling across the pages - so gradually at times that it's barely noticeable, and so quickly at other times that entire generations transform in the blink of an eye. This creates a ripple effect, as the stories we read about early on turn into rumour and are, in some cases, eventually enshrined into island legend themselves over time. Parents, grandparents and children live out their own stories, each of them unique, but often crossing each other in a pattern that - just like in real-life communities - is dictated by fate and emotion, not reason, and is therefore just a smidgeon too irregular to ever be grasped and understood.

All in all, I thought that the book's concept was absolutely fantastic, but I want to talk about the writing itself, too. Gilbert's words absolutely drip with atmosphere - this is lyrical, haunting prose, as wild as the island's cliffs and gullies, as dazzlingly beautiful as the night sky the kites soar in. The characters are not drawn in exceptional detail - we never stay with any of them long enough to truly plumb the depths of their soul - but by the time I'd finished the book, they all felt familiar to me, all the same. As for the stories themselves, there were definitely some that I liked more than others. Magic saturated every word in some of them, while others found the strange and sinister in the ordinary or simply whisked the illusion of the supernatural clean away; fact and fiction are blended more closely in some than others, so that in some cases the reader is left wondering exactly how much of the story was real; and some were deliberately confusing, others almost brutal, others startling, others sinister, others absolutely enchanting. I don't want to go into the content of the tales themselves, but I will say that the final story brings closure and a sense of circularity to the book as a whole. It doesn't bring together all the characters or stories that have gone before it, nor even all the loose ends, but it does bring several of them together, and as an ending, it feels right. There were certain stories that I felt were too disconnected to the others, and some where a lack of resolution fell flat rather than creating a deliberate air of mystery, but for the most part, I felt like they fit together fairly well.

And, well, I can't quite resist giving a special shoutout to my absolute favourite tale of the bunch - 'Swirling Cleft' was one of the most magical, surprising, and uplifting tales of all, and I absolutely adored it. Then again, I've always had a soft spot for stories wreathed in mist and fog, so perhaps it's unsurprising that I was so captivated by it.

All in all, I thought that this was a fantastic debut novel. Wonderful in style, wonderful in concept, and with just a few narrative hitches, this book has definitely persuaded me to keep an eye on Zoe Gilbert in the future.

Utterly captivating, Folk by Zoe Gilbert takes the form of connected short stories, about the inhabitants of a slightly fantastical island called Neverness. It is a place where the folklore and legends are as real as the hardships of life in this remote, windswept place.

The stories build, so that a character who appears as a child might return as a adult later on, and the events of one tale recur as an urban legend in another. This structure works brilliantly to create a sense of the way customs, traditions and superstitions are born out of oral history. It also ties everything together, fleshes out the characters and gives the whole book a greater richness.

Melancholy at times, these tales are told with such verve they are addictive. A gorgeous, incredible book.

This is gorgeously written with some fine imagery - and really, the stylish prose and vivid pictures it conjures up are more important, in some ways, than the narrative story-telling. This draws on European fairy-tales but also Classical myths (the bull-fighting made me think of the bull-dancers in the Theseus/Cretan myths, for example), and the ring-structure points back to archaic poetry as well as duplicating the circle of the seasons.

A little Angela Carter, for sure, but Gilbert has managed to absorb her influences to create an original voice.

Oh, and an absolutely stunning cover!