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The Good People is Hannah Kent's second novel,following her internationally successful,Baileys-Prize-shortlistedBurial Rites. Middle-aged Nora lives in a poor Irish village,where the"good people"(as fairies are known) are still a powerful presence. She has just lost her husband – a terrible blow on top of her daughter's recent death,which has left her burdened with the care of her grandchild,Micheal. Born healthy,the two-year-old is now feeble and unresponsive,with wrists that"bent inwards,fingers stiff as pokers".

When Nance,the local wise woman comes to keen at the wake,she is moved to help. Convinced the child is a changeling,the women set about"putting the fairy out of him",to make the good people return the"real"child.

<i>The Good People</i>,by Hannah Kent. — *The Good People*,by Hannah Kent.

While the novel concentrates on this quest,the awful drama finds its heart in a fourth player:teenage Mary,a desperately poor girl Nora recruits to bear the brunt of caring for Micheal. Though the work is unrelenting,she finds herself moved by the child,and resists as much as she can,with a growing sense of horror,as the women's methods grow more violent. Inexorably,the novel turns into a gripping courtroom drama.

IfThe Good People seems familiar in time and theme to Kent's first novel – which also recounts the sufferings of women with no real choices at a time when religion is trying to banish still rawly present magic – this is not coincidental. Kent stumbled on the true story the novel is based on while researchingBurial Rites,set in 1829 Iceland,and kept the copied pages of the 1826 court transcript.

It is fascinating to watch other common threads emerge. Kent seems drawn to harsh,unbearably confining landscapes,in which the notion of privacy is unthinkable. The peaty firesides ofThe Good People are as stifling asBurial Rites' badstofa (shared bed),which Agnes,sentenced to death for the murder of her lover,must share with the family who are her keepers.

The books are also both highly cinematic. Threatening rivers"infuriated by storms"and mist-shrouded fairy rings provide the mise-en-scene of the filmThe Good People is almost begging to become. They are also filmic in a deeper sense,in playing out their drama at a slight remove;although we know what the characters are thinking,we also seem to watch the action from a poised middle distance.

Kent is an even-handed dramatist,recreating,on the one hand,in Nance,the richness of Irish folk knowledge,and,on the other,the lonely old woman's failing grip on her"knowledge"in the face of the new priest's persecution,as well as the suffering of the child.

In its faithful reimagining of clashing moral and spiritual dimensions,The Good Peoplediffers strikingly from recent historical novels that add a knowing modern layer to the past (such as Sarah Moss'Night Waking or Sarah Perry'sThe Essex Serpent);but also from classic late-20th-century works such as Penelope Fitzgerald's,which layer rich irony and eccentricity into a faithfully rendered past. If it were a film,it would be closer to a classic mid-century psychological drama,than,say,the postmodern,auteurist vision of a director like Michael Haneke.

While holding few surprises,The Good People is a gripping,adept and intelligent reconstruction of the past. As inBurial Rites,although perhaps without quite the same force,Kent brings her sympathetic,detailed eye to the cramped lives of ordinary women before the dawn of any concept of individual women's rights.