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Book Reviewed by:In an alternate history, a radical group overthrew Churchill and made peace with Hitler. Now, eight years later at a country retreat, one of the group is murdered; and suspicion falls on the Jewish husband of one of their adult children.
Over a summers weekend in 1949 -- but not our 1949 -- the upper-crust "Farthing set," the group that overthrew Churchill and negotiated peace with Hitler eight years before, enjoys a country retreat. Lucy is a minor daughter of two politicians in the group; since her marriage to a London Jew, relations have been strained. So she's surprised when she and husband David are invited for the weekend.
Then, overnight, a different member of the set is found murdered, with abundant signs that the killing was ritualistic. As the authorities begin to investigate, it becomes clear to Lucy and David that they were invited in order to pin the murder on David. But whoever devised this conspiracy didn't reckon on the man from Scotland Yard being someone with his own private reasons for sympathizing with outcasts and looking beyond the obvious. As the trap slowly shuts on Lucy and David, they begin to see a way out -- a way fraught with peril in a darkening world.
More than an alternate-history story, more than a drawing-room mystery, Farthing is a compelling story of encroaching darkness and the people who ultimately decide to resist it.
This is a fine, thought provoking book, easily on a par with Philip Roth's The Plot Against America...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Jo Walton is the author of The King's Peace (2000), The King's Name (2001), The Prize in the Game (2002), Tooth and Claw (2003), Muses and Lurkers (collection, 2001) and Farthing. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, and the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her style is to take a familiar element and pair it with the unfamiliar in order to put a new and interesting spin on things. For example, in Tooth and Claw she mixed elements of Anthony Trollope's Victorian society with dragons to create a story that Booklist described...
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If you liked Farthing, try these:
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C.J. Sansom rewrites history in a thrilling novel that dares to imagine Britain under the thumb of Nazi Germany.
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
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Harry Turtledove
Farthing is a quietly convincing horror, a tale of a world that might have been and that we're damned lucky we never really saw. Read it, think about it, and count your blessings.
