Maria Albano

This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of

‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of