Welcome to the Book Review Book Club! Every month, we select a book to discuss with our readers. Last month, we read “What We Can Know,” by Ian McEwan. (You can also go back and listen to our episodes on “Hamnet,” “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter” and “Pride and Prejudice.”)
Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”
How did we get here, with five sisters being hunted by an angry mob that suspects them of murder? That is the tale “The Hounding” unfolds.
The story is set in a provincial village in 18th-century England. There’s a church, an alehouse, a market, a hamlet of people just trying to get by. And then there are the Mansfield sisters.
Ask any villager and they’ll tell you: The girls have always been strange. But one night the local ferryman, Pete Darling, sees the girls transform into a pack of dogs, or so he swears. It’s a far-fetched rumor, totally unbelievable and from an unreliable source — Pete is frequently drunk and is known to stretch the truth.
Despite its implausibility, though, the rumor begins to catch hold, dividing the town. Meanwhile, it’s the summer; a drought is drying up the land, and the heat is bringing this small community to a boil.
What’s the truth, and what does it mean for this village and for the Mansfield sisters? As told by a cast of villagers, each contending with these lurid rumors and their consequences, “The Hounding” is a gothic parable about male ego, society’s treatment of girls and women, and the dangers of gossip run amok.
In January, the Book Review Book Club will read and discuss “The Hounding,” by Xenobe Purvis. We’ll be chatting about it on the Book Review podcast that airs on Jan. 30 and we’d love for you to join the conversation. Share your thoughts about the novel in the comments section of this article by Jan. 22, and we may mention your observations in the episode.
Here’s some related reading to get you started.
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Our review of “The Hounding”: “In the Mansfields, Purvis has spun a subtle, clever riff on a vampire story. The horror, for this community, isn’t in the girls’ alleged transformation but in the idea that wildness and aberrance have been coiled in them from the beginning.” Read the full review here.
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NPR’s interview with Purvis about the modern resonances of the novel: “The question of girlhood and the place of girls in society — that started the whole thing off for me. And then I was repeatedly struck, in writing the book, by the disturbing contemporary relevance of many of the themes that it raises — the safety of girls and the policing of their bodies, toxic masculinity, resistance to nonconformity. These are concerns that we continue to contend with and that make their way into new stories every day.” Read the full interview here.
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Debutiful’s Q&A with Purvis about her reading life and the books that influenced her: “‘Middlemarch,’ ‘The Portrait of a Lady,’ ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘Giovanni’s Room,’ ‘A Single Man.’ Each of these novels is a master class in style and psychological insight.” Read the full interview here.
We can’t wait to discuss the novel with you. In the meantime, happy reading!
The post Book Club: Read ‘The Hounding,’ by Xenobe Purvis, With the Book Review appeared first on New York Times.
