A good idea (a story told backwards) which is unfortunately disappointingly executed. The book doesn't flow well and is muddled at times.

I have very mixed emotions about the book but over all i enjoyed it. My rating is somewhere in between 4 and 5. Every detail makes it so real, like we would be there.

I was absorbed from the start but became uninterested about half-way which was frustrating. I haven’t since finished it. I did enjoy listening to some podcasts from the author about her writing process.

I must say that the striking cover is what drew me to this book.

I don’t mind slow pacing in a book but with this one I was a fidgety reader. I can appreciate the concept of telling a story backwards however I felt disconnected from the characters throughout most of the story and was not satisfied with the open ending.

This will be a fantastic read for the reader that prefers style over substance.

England in February 1491. John Reve is the priest in the small, benighted village of Oakham, in Somerset. He is told by the rural dean to investigate the circumstances the death of the major village landholder Thomas Newham. The dean believes it was murder while Reve thinks it was just an unfortunate accident in falling into the rain-swollen river. John Reve has to deal with a range of bizarre superstition and ignorance amongst his flock. The village is so isolated and neglected that it is almost a pastiche of medieval attitudes in which the all the population seek answers to their daily struggled via celestial intervention. A significant element of the story takes place in the confessional, where Reve tries to make sense of villagers’ worries and sins. The death of Newham threatens to unravel the stability of the village, inviting in outsiders to meddle and mess everything up.
It is an intelligent and literate story – seeped in the pre-Reformation prejudices and poverty of rural England, where it was a major struggle just to survive a wet and chilly winter.
The novel has a reverse chronology structure, which may be a merry little project for a creative writing course, but which creates some difficulties for the reader. I found the effect rather irritating and constantly had to think back to what I already knew and adjust this knowledge when reading the narrative and making sense of it backwards. It allows the writer to expand upon the story and provide details that the reader had not initially seen or been aware of, but I could have done without the constant mental acrobatics!

Such an interesting book. The story follows the events that unfold in Oakham, a 15th century hamlet in Somerset, after the disappearance of it's wealthiest (and therefore most important) citizen. The story follows the local priest, John Reve, and through him we slowly discover the characters and secrets of the other inhabitants of this tiny community. Although there are questions surrounding the disappearance throuhout the novel - was it an accident? Was it murder? - this is not a thriller by any stretch, more of a quiet character study. The writing style was instantly engaging and kept you wanting to come back for more, and I loved the narrative technique used. Instead of traditionally beginning with a disappearance and going from there, Harvey has us travel backwards, slowly peeling away the layers of the character's behaviours to reveal what lays beneath. I know it's not a style that suits everyone, but I found this so clever, and it really turned all assumptons I'd made about the characters completely around. Fantastic! Will definitely enjoy rereading this at some point again in the future.

Having read Samantha Harvey's Dear Thief, I knew she was an incredible prose writer, but in The Western Wind she demonstrates a breadth that goes beyond the relatively narrow confines of her previous book (much as I loved it). The Western Wind, set in the small Somerset village of Oakham in 1491, is narrated by the local priest, John Reve. The novel opens with the confirmation of the death of one of the most prominent villagers, Thomas Newman: a man respected by his fellows as a wealthy benefactor, but who recently returned from a trip to Rome with new and strange ideas about religion. When the dean swoops in to investigate Newman's death, Reve realises that to protect his flock he will have to find some answers of his own. Was Newman murdered? Did he fall in by accident, mirroring the fate of the last bridge that was supposed to connect Oakham to the outside world? Or - despite the stakes for his immortal soul - could he have committed suicide?

The Western Wind is especially impressive in its handling of time. The novel, like Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, moves backwards; we start on the fourth day, when Newman's abandoned shirt is discovered, and finish on the first day, when Newman is still alive. Harvey handles this incredibly well; the closer time frame means she has to be even cleverer than Waters to avoid unnecessary repetition and confusion, and she pulls it off with consistent grace, making brilliant use of seemingly throwaway details. The cold goose fat in Reve's fireplace on the fourth day becomes a goose unhappily devoured on the third; milk trickling between cobbles on the third day becomes a milk-cart upset on the second. However, I think it would be a mistake to think of the book's structure as linear in either direction. As the repeating chapter titles indicate, Harvey is exploring the different ways in which these late medieval villagers might have thought of time; it's also circular, with each season leading to the next and the birth of Jesus leading to his death and then his birth. It's only when the book comes full circle and we witness Reve's last conversation with Newman that we understand what has happened. The two ends join together.

Harvey also makes adept use of the conceit of the confessional, newly introduced to Oakham at the time of Newman's death after he brought back news of this novel practice from Rome (I've seen some quibbling about the accuracy of this from some readers, but it seems to me that Harvey isn't thinking about a fixed, immovable confession-box but some form of structure in which to give confessions, rather than them being heard in public as was the previous practice.) In this limited privacy, Reve learns more about his fellow villagers than was the case before. And we too get a glimpse into a medieval village that seems entirely complete, with its own rituals and connections. Whatever the precise dating of confessionals, Harvey certainly does as well with the medieval mindset as could be expected in a modern novel, especially when exploring Reve's faith and his fretting over Newman's ultimate fate. For example, Reve frets over whether Newman saw St Christopher on the wall of the church before he died, as this was believed to provide some protection for the soul for those who died unshriven. The Western Wind requires some thought and time from the reader, but it definitely repays that effort.

In 15th century Somerset, a village is isolated between high ground and a river. Various attempts to find funding and the skills to build a bridge have foundered, and with it the village’s hopes of prosperity. Then in the early hours of Shrove Saturday, the body of a villager is swept away by the river and everyone looks to the priest for answers. ‘The Western Wind’ by Samantha Harvey is a contemplative, slow burn about John Reve, the priest, his care for the villagers of Oakham, and the persistent questions of his visiting rural dean about the death of Thomas Newman.
The story timeline is chopped up and told backwards, which adds to the mystery. The novel starts with the sighting of the body and the finding of a green shirt in the bulrushes. This is a sign, Reve says, that Newman’s soul has crossed into heaven. Only at the end, do we find out the truth of what really happened. The dean is a threat; we never know his name, and only at the end are we given a physical description of him. He suggests to Reve that as this is the season of confession, a pardon be issued to anyone confessing in the next three days. This, he hopes, will enable him to tell the archdeacon that the death was investigated and the village is full of church-going people who are faithful penitents. He tells Reve: ‘You’re the parish priest – your word weighs a hundred times a normal man’s, two hundred times a woman’s, three hundred times a child’s. Your word is a silver weight in the palm. Your word is worth trading money for. It would cut like a stone through water.’ But what is a parish to do if a priest fails in his office and then compounds that failure with lies; and worse, encourages a parishioner to lie. Everyone in the village is affected by what has happened. Reve has a privileged position, he listens to the confessions of all the villagers; he knows their secrets. But to whom does he tell his own secrets? Unsure his actions and feeling threatened by the dean’s relentless questions, he asks God to send the western wind as a sign of approval and to blow away the spirits.
There are all sorts of themes going on here. The fine line between religion and superstition. The hypocrisy and lies of religion and its priests. The honesty and doggedness of the rural poor and their willingness to believe in symbols and spirits as well as God. It considers the practice of confession, that allows a person to sin in the knowledge that they will be blessed by the priest afterwards.
This is a careful, restrained novel – as fitting its contemplative clerical narrator – rich in descriptive detail. But at times I wishes it moved a little faster or was a little shorter. Told entirely from Reve’s point of view, it might perhaps have benefited from another voice. I also found the ending rather abrupt.

Thanks Random House UK, Vintage Publishing and netgalley for this ARC.

Very slow to start but you won't get a more intense and real to life immersive experience in medieval day to day living than this novel. All the sordid, crazy, and immoral confessions with a sleuthing priest throw into the mix.

This is a difficult book to review. Did I enjoy it? The short answer is yes, but. The reader has to work at this one, since it is written in a winding, sometimes confusing style, whereby we unravel the story in a backwards fashion.

The most fascinating part of this book is the setting, a small village in Somerset in the 1400s, where religion holds everyone in its grip. The author runs through various themes, the idea of sin being one - John Reve, the priest, has his own secrets, Sarah is apparently being punished by god with a wasting sickness, the idea that Newman, the man who is drowned, died unshriven, with his sins unconfessed. The horror of it, the fear that whispers out of the pages.

I finished the book with more questions than answers, but that does not mean that it wasn't an enjoyable read. It isn't an easy read, but it is one that sticks in the mind long after it's over, which is a good thing to me.

I really struggled with this book and almost gave up several times. I think because it is written backwards from the discovery of a body and seems to jump about from place to place. I really didn’t enjoy it much.

I wanted to love this- the book is so wonderfully written and the concept is fantastic. It is told backwards, making the situation clearer as you go along, however there is no real conclusion which was frustrating.

Father John Reve is a good priest, a conscientious and caring man keen to do his best for the village of Oakham and its people. He faces an impossible dilemma in the aftermath of the drowning of the village’s most prominent landowner and the arrival of his church superior to investigate what happened and what should be done. Although we learn of his dilemma in the first part of the book, we don’t understand the full implications of it until we have been taken back over the three days leading up to it. I quite often found this structure difficult to follow and frustrating but, by the end of the story when all has become clear, I saw that it heightened the emotional impact.

I liked the character of Reve very much. A thoughtful man, not unworldly or over-pious, continually analysing his own performance, measuring himself against his ideal and fearing he comes up short - or heavy according to the village tradition of ‘weighing the priest’ the night before Lent to see if he was better fed than his congregation. I finished the book hoping he could see things come right for the village, stave off a hostile takeover by the neighbouring monks and other possible repercussions for his people.

I thought there was a nice medieval feel to the writing, to the village atmosphere and the nature of faith and the priesthood in the 15th century mind. Perhaps the pace at which the story unfolded was a little slow, but that made the experience seem all the more authentic to me. I am torn between a 3 and 4 star rating, but will go with 4 stars for the fact that the story has stayed on my mind for several days since finishing the book.

The story centres on a remote English village at the end of the 15th Century seemingly unaffected by the political upheavals of the past. The spiritual and temporal well being of the village is in the hands of the Village priest. The events that took place over the week end up to stove Tuesday is seen in depth through the eyes of the priest. Events take place that threatens the future wellbeing of the village and the priest through the confessions and the sharing of confidences and secrets results provides him with a number of options to plot the way ahead. The village is under threat of having its arable land acquired by a rich monastery neighbour and there is a need to build a bridge across the river from the bank where the village is located to enhance its future. A most interesting and intriguing story that ends with the priest left with having to decide what to do by strove Tuesday. Having shared the same knowledge as acquired by the priest what he decide is left with the reader to ponder.

I tried - I really did - but I fell asleep, started thinking about other things and just could not get into it. This book is full of rich descriptions of 15th century life; the mud, the poverty, the superstitions but seemed to be lacking a story line.

Apparently there is a mystery but maybe my concentration was so bad that I missed that bit. It was not for me and I am afraid I gave up.

1491 and Oakham is a small Somerset village cut off from its neighbours by a flood swollen river. When the wealthy landowner Newman disappears, Priest John Reve has to hold the village together under threat. One by one the villagers come to confess and John finds himself holder of secrets and lies. However John Reve also has secrets and the local Dean may find these out.

For all its setting in a medieval village, this is an age old story of people's secrets and suspicions. Whilst there is plenty of reference to the era, and it forms a good setting in terms of priestly confession, there is a modern take on historical fiction here.

A Cadfael type mystery.

15th century Oakham, in Somerset, is cut off by a big river. A man has been swept away and an explanation is needed. It is up to the priest, John Reve, to investigate and unravel the mystery of why the victim, Thomas Newman, the wealthiest man in the village, would have been near the river and why and who killed him if indeed he was murdered.

This book is written backwards. It starts with the body and goes back to how the body came to be where it was found. Totally and ridiculously awkward. I just could not get to grips with it. I had to push myself to continue reading so I could review it.

The characters were overly complex and Reve, with his secrets, just padded out the book. I have given the book 3 stars because the writing and editing were ok and I liked the cover.

Shesat

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

"Men die because they're born to die."

If you're expecting a cosy murder mystery with a rotund clergyman at the centre then The Western Wind isn't for you. However, neither is it a bloodthirsty shock a minute thriller. The Western Wind is a slow paced mystery set in the 15th century with a thoughtful and sometimes pompous priest unravelling the mystery. I quite liked the pace of the book, it's slow and steadily unravelling yet it was oddly riveting.
What adds something a little extra to the narrative is that it is told backwards. I'm not going to lie, this was sometimes confusing but I think it worked as when the revelations came I kept wanting to turn back to previous pages. It's the sort of book you need to read again once it's finished to see all the clues.
However, I didn't read it again because, although I enjoyed The Western Wind, it was a little hard work at some points. The main character John Reve was well developed and thoughtful, but his musings on religion and ethics could sometimes become a little too heavy and held the story back.
Having said that, religion is a big theme within the book and it really shows how in that time period, the Church was at the centre of everything, especially in such a tiny village where a lot of the villagers had never even crossed the river.
This does give the book a slightly oppressive feel, which works well with the mystery, and provides a small cast of suspects and allows the narrator to worm her way into their lives.

This was an ideal book to read in the dingy and drizzly evenings that we've been having recently.

My Rating: 4 Stars

I received a copy of The Western Wind, via NetGalley, in return for an honest review. My thanks to the author and publisher.

A very well written and obviously well researched book. The beliefs and behaviours of the people in Somerset in the 1500s are vividly put together in this fascinating read. I would definitely recommend this to anyone who enjoys historical fiction.

This book was a bit hard to start and get involved with, but if you're a bit patient, it's worth the wait.

It's a medieval murder mystery. Very atmospheric, that's set in a small village in 1491. The story evolves backwards over the course of 4 days, and our head character is the parish priest, John Reve, The richest man in the area, Thomas Newman, drowns and his body is nowhere to be found. It's up to Reve to discover what happened.
I liked the characters, and the story taking place mostly in the confession box, which was unique. However, the only frustration for me was no actual resolution.
Overall, I enjoyed the book definitely with its unique writing style. I found it thought-provoking, and very ambient.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the copy in exchange for an honest review.