I’ve now read all but one of Brooks’s novels, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed each one; they are supremely interesting meditations on faith and man-made miracles, on the relationship between spiritual and man-made health, and in this case, the concept of grace (which is, I’ll admit, a notion whose full subtlety I’ve still not really grasped.) The descriptions I’ve read about this novel leave a rather grim residue - it’s after all fundamentally about the plague - but in actual fact it is not very gruesome, and very much a picture of the sort of wondrous things that people are capable in dire circumstances. The heroine, Anna Firth, is a realistic but miraculously liberal-minded sort of person, compassionate and selfless almost to a fault. She is surrounded by strong women whose strength, of course, is the exact thing their neighbors despise; yet she somehow survives, and seems to glide through this extremely restrictive world, haunted and traumatized by all of the misery she sees and yet somehow still quite plucky. The twin symbolism of mining and harvesting, and the grim business of burying that is sandwiched between them, is a clever (and ok, rather dark) device to frame the book. My one misgiving is that the ending is a little odd and struck me as more than a little unrealistic. But I suppose, there’s got to be something more than a predictable happy ending.