The Good People

In a remote valley in 1825 Ireland, Nóra Leahy is left to care for her four-year-old grandson Micheál after her daughter's death — a boy who can no longer walk or speak and who Nóra becomes convinced is not truly her grandson at all, but a changeling left behind by fairies. Isolated by grief and stigma, she turns to Nance Roche, an elderly woman who lives on the valley's edge and is known for herbal cures and knowledge of the old ways, to help her get her real grandson back.

Kent, working from a real historical case, builds the novel around the collision between the community's folk beliefs, the encroaching authority of the Catholic Church and the law, and the sheer desperation of a household in crisis. The valley's poverty and isolation are as central to the atmosphere as the folklore itself, and the novel is unsparing about where superstition and grief can lead when there's no other recourse.

The Good People is atmospheric, slow-building literary historical fiction, following Kent's earlier novel Burial Rites in its interest in real, obscure historical crimes and the women caught up in them.