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!

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.

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.

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.