Lovely Quote

From Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, a novel about plague in 17th-Century central England. Beautifully written but heartbreaking and "difficult." The first two sentences have a lovely image, but the whole of the paragraph is worthy, too, giving us a snapshot description of the village that is the focus of the whole novel:

Our village is a thin thread of dwellings, unspooling east and west of the church. The main road frays here and there into a few narrower paths that lead to the mill, to Bradford Hall, the larger farms, and the lonelier crofts. We have always built here with what we have to hand, so our walls are hewn of the common gray stone and the roofs thatched with heather. Behind the cottages on either side of the road lie tilled fields and grazing commons, but these end abruptly in a sudden rise or fall of ground: the looming Edge to the north of us, its sheer stone face sharply marking the end of settled land and the beginning of the moors, and to the south, the swift, deep dip of the Dale. (p. 11)