Book Review

Country People

by Daniel Mason (John Murray Press, 2026)

This is a highly enjoyable and original novel that delves into stories within stories. The author, Daniel Mason, says, “As a psychiatrist, I spend much of my time thinking about why people believe things that aren’t true and yet the books I love most are often those that are the most fanciful and imaginative. Country People began as a way to explore this beguiling and often dangerous borderland of fantasy and falsehood. It was a fun and meaningful and often surprising process to explore ideas I find myself thinking about each day, whether family, community, our relationship with nature or the essential role of play and humour in our lives.”

Kate, Miles and their two children Wesley and Olive leave California for what they hope will be an idyllic year in rural Vermont, where Kate will take a professorial post introducing students to her beloved Milton and Blake, and Miles, a likeable but failing scholar of Russian folktales, will attempt to complete his dissertation, now 12 years late. Each one carries a fantasy of what their new life will be like. But nothing turns out as expected and, in the process, Miles meets an assortment of characters almost as fantastical as those that people his bedtime stories for the children – indeed, he and Kate have a code word, Humbaba (one of his vivid invented characters), to remind Miles to tone it down to avoid treading too far into the territory of suggestibility.

One story leads to another, as Miles meets more and more unconventional locals and comes across a bizarre, somewhat lifechanging legend, which he starts to believe might be true. Along the way, there is much to be explored about human needs, met and unmet (and canine needs, too, in the form of unforgettable Giuseppe, originally bred to hunt truffles although, to his frustration, there aren’t any.)

Country People is both whimsical and sharp. People are deftly sketched in bewitching colour, and there is much that is laugh-out-loud funny. (We learn how talented Kate is at teaching classes on Milton and Blake because dwindling enrolments had left her Californian colleagues “forced to pander, changing ‘English 7: Shakespeare” to ‘Sex in Shakespeare’; ‘English 28: Middlemarch’ to ‘Learning programming from Middlemarch (a novel); and ‘Comp Lit 111: Russian Masters’ to ‘“Look what you made me do”: Fyodor (Dostoyevsky) and Taylor (Swift)’.)

As Miles bumbles on, discovering the realities of rural life, both awesome and banal, he comes to realise that, while “hunting fantastical stories with a group of half-deluded misfits”, he may have misunderstood a lot of important things about his family life. And is Olive so taken in by a story he has woven for her that her own life becomes at risk? Traditional stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, and this one has a corker of an ending which, in sealing a seam that appeared to run innocuously through the story, satisfyingly connects up the whole.

Reviewed by Denise Winn