George Aranda

It's a very lean kind of novel.

And everything that's written about in terms of goings-on in the village, you can kind of understand.

But there's also this sense of sadness and regret that goes over the whole village.

So whether that's because they talk about the tragedy...

that maybe underlies what happened to the world at that time.

But there's a sense of loss and longing.

There are certain parts where a character's looking for ponies.

She's heard they exist, but she could never find them.

And I think that's a really kind of touching way of thinking about this dystopic world.

i really was intrigued in the first half of the book i thought it was beautifully written as i was saying before and the idea of the the kind of the law in the town and the lawlessness as well on the other side were quite were things that were really pushing the story along in a really interesting kind of way i was kind of disappointed in the second half of the book because they really spent a lot of time unpacking a couple of narratives

that to me aren't really taken to their full degree or they're not really made great use of towards the end of the book as it draws to its conclusion.

So I was a little disappointed with the last part of the book there.

But overall, I thought it was quite an interesting take on the dystopian novel.

That's right.

I mean, I was really happy because quite often, you know, you read a book and you're halfway through it and you can kind of pick the killer or what's going to happen at the end.

And I was quite surprised about some of the things that do eventuate, and I love that in a book.

But then they've spent a lot of time going through these extra narratives that just don't quite get anywhere in the story.

Exactly right.

Yeah, I finished it last week for my book club, and I really enjoyed the story.

I hadn't read Susanna Clarke's other book, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I was really pleasantly surprised by another kind of dystopia, but in more of a magical kind of world where nothing really makes sense, and you're in this