Books in brief: A Kind Man

 

    Another brief post about a brief book, but the relative shortness of Susan Hill's A Kind Man is part of its quality. This is a precise and powerful novel, one of restraint and self-containment, quite spell-binding in its spareness.

    It's set in a northern town in the Depression years of the 1930s, but there's nothing heavy-handed about the descriptions of place or people; they are outlined and worked up with a simple detail here and an expressive line there, and that economy is very effective when so perfectly place and well done.

    When Eve meets Tommy Carr she sees he is 'a kind man': "it was the only question that mattered and contained everything else within itself". So it proves when they marry and have a child, but when their little daughter dies, grief affects Eve and Tommy in different ways, and it's what happens then which is at the heart of the book. I won't go into that here as it's for the reader to discover, but it makes for a thought-provoking, poignant novel and an intense reading experience. I loved it.