Latest news with #LittleNettlebed
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
8 New Books We Love This Week
Every week, critics and editors at The New York Times Book Review pick the most interesting and notable new releases, from literary fiction and serious nonfiction to thrillers, romance novels, mysteries and everything in between. You can save the books you're most excited to read on a personal reading list, and find even more recommendations from our book experts. Historical fiction The Hounding In 1700s England, the town of Little Nettlebed is scandalized by a rumor that the five Mansfield sisters, already considered odd and aloof, are transforming into a pack of dogs at night. Purvis's debut is a wildly inventive riff on the Gothic form, with enough suspense and mounting dread to rival Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery.' Read our review. Memoir Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book Let us help you choose your next book Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
5 Eerie Sisters Who Morph Into Dogs? This Town Has Even More to Fear.
THE HOUNDING, by Xenobe Purvis Welcome to Little Nettlebed, England, where the 'season of strangeness' has begun. Heat is addling every resident's mind, priming them to feel indiscriminate rage — toward even 'the sound of the birds, the air on their skin.' A sturgeon, huge and unholy, is found beached along the shrinking river. And there are the Mansfield girls — five orphaned, aloof sisters in mourning, whose self-possession and inscrutable mien make their neighbors uneasy. The local drunk, a misogynistic ferryman named Pete Darling, swears he's seen them transform into a pack of dogs, and before long, news of his dubious vision has bolted around town. Xenobe Purvis's outstanding debut novel, 'The Hounding,' unfolds in 1700s Oxfordshire, but the atmosphere of paranoia and bloodthirsty groupthink often feels uncomfortably familiar. The Mansfields — Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace and Mary, so close that their names spoken aloud sound like an incantation, or a prayer — live just beyond town with their grandfather Joseph, a recent widower. Half-blind and benevolent, like a sweetly fictionalized John Milton, Joseph presides over what once was a happy, liberated farm. His wife had a fiercely independent streak: a point of pride for Joseph, and a trait they nurtured in their granddaughters. Now his greatest wish is to protect the girls from malign incursions, and he's right to worry — beyond his home is 'a ravenous world, a world with teeth.' True to its name, there's an ominous air throughout Little Nettlebed. 'If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church,' Purvis writes of the villagers. No one models this better than Pete Darling, who is prone to visitations from angels and vaguely biblical dreams while recovering from a bender. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
22 Books Coming in August
The Hounding In 1700s England, the town of Little Nettlebed is scandalized by a rumor: that the five Mansfield sisters, already considered odd and aloof, are transforming into a pack of dogs at night. Purvis's debut is a wildly inventive riff on the Gothic form, with enough suspense and mounting dread to rival Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery.' Holt, Aug. 5 Flashout Soloski, a culture reporter for The New York Times as well as a novelist, returns with a dark dive into the theater world. The book follows a performer, Allison, at two stages in her life: first as a college student in the 1970s who finds herself ensnared in a dangerous, cultlike theater troupe, and later as a jaded, middle-aged drama teacher who is running away from a past that seems to be finally catching up with her. Flatiron, Aug. 5 Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book Let us help you choose your next book Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
