Year Of Wonders

Written by a journalist, Geraldine Brooks, 'Year of Wonders' has a reportage flavour to it.
This book chronicles two years in the life of Anna Frith, a woman living in a remote Derbyshire village, from the time the bubonic plague arrives (1665) to claim its first victims, to when it departs, having ravaged the town, reducing the population by two-thirds.

The narrator is a poor woman taken under the wing of the village rector and educated to read and write by his wife. She is flawed but clear of vision, not turning her head from the terrors in store for her.
The basic story is a true one, of one village's noble attempt to halt the spread of illness by shutting itself off from the world for one year, but Brooks deftly captures a larger story of isolation, loss, loneliness, and fear. The heroine's grasp of the fragility of hope and her desperate hold on reasons to carry on make for often anguishing reading, but written with such clarity and precision that this is never a struggle.
At times, the descriptions of the plague are so raw and grisly that I kept finding myself on buses with my mouth gaping in horror.

Brooks has an amazing way with words and there are certain passages that beg to be re-read often, one example follows:

'It is a strange prospect, our main street these days. I used
to rue its dustiness in summer and muddiness in winter,
the rain all rizen in the wheel ruts making glassy hazards
for the unwary stepper. But now there is neither ice nor
mud nor dust, for the road is grassed over, with just a
cow-track down the centre where the slight use of a few
passing feet has worn the weeds down. For hundreds of
years, the people of this village pushed Nature back from
its precincts. It has taken less than a year to begin to
reclaim its place. In the very middle of the street, a walnut
shell lies broken, and from it, already, sprouts a sapling
that wants to grow up to block our way entire. I have
watched it from its first seed leaves, wondering when
someone would pull it out. No one has yet done so, and
now it stands already a yard high. Footprints testify that
we are all walking around it. I wonder if it is indifference,
or whether, like me, others are so brimful of endings that
they cannot bear to wretch even a scrawny sapling from its
tenuous grip on life.'

Somehow, this book encapsulates perfectly the feeling of life being so fleeting, to know that you might be next and to thank your lucky stars that the Black Death is now treatable (there are plenty of things that are not treatable, but luckily this one gruesome disease is almost out of the picture).
I don't want to be one of those people, that when there is a bit of a 'crunching of the credit' (as one friend's grandmother so delicately put it), to suddenly start reading and recommending lots of books that make you 'appreciate your life' and think 'there's always others that are worse off', but I will recommend this one, as it makes you want to be someone who is strong and can pick out glistening specks of beauty from the dirt in which it lies.