Set in an English village after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the novel centres on Thomas Davies, Darwin’s gardener, who has lost his wife and lives at the edge of village life with his children.

Around him, the village observes, mutters, judges, mythologises, and misreads. This technically historical is built of everything but formality. It is a chorus of gossip, superstition, religion, grief, science, class tension, and rural fear. The pressure is not the great man of history but the shockwave around him: what happens when ordinary people are forced to live beside an idea that unsettles their old arrangements of God, nature, morality, illness, death, and human importance. 

A strange, spare, atmospheric book about intellectual change at ground level — not in universities or salons, but in gardens, kitchens, sickrooms, church pews and village talk. Good for readers of translated fiction, compact literary novels, Darwin-adjacent historical fiction, rural strangeness, and books that treat gossip as a social nervous system.

Peirene Press paperback, 2013. Translated from Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah. Supported by English PEN / Arts Council England. Good used condition. Light shelf and handling wear; clean, solid reading copy.