All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls

This Oxford-based author won many awards for her novel Ways to Live Forever and has written another winner. It is 1349. A village near York is overwhelmed by “the single biggest catastrophe in historical memory” — the plague. Ingleforn is home to 14-year-old Isabel, who “can’t imagine living another sort of life” with her family’s animals warm behind the wattle wall of their small house, the fields to cultivate, a church and the abbey nearby.

But her village is devastated as the miasma seeps into every corner bringing sickness and death — black buboes, red markings and fever.

Isabel is caught in a cruel dilemma; if she helps those struck down, will she endanger her family and the safety of the whole village?

Finally she and her childhood sweetheart Robin are left to care for her younger brother and sister. Then Thomas, a rich and mysterious stranger whose entire family has died, offers them the shelter of his great house in York. Robin grabs at the chance, but she is wary. Nicholls is too truthful a novelist to give us a happy ending in this problematic and different world. Through the sensitive, brave, hopeful and questioning eyes of Isabel, we experience the darkness of the Black Death.

Through her meticulous evocation of life in a medieval village, Nicholls does not shrink from detailing the horror, loss, pain and the struggle for survival in this inspiring novel. She will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday. To boo,k, see right.