TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME

England 1348 and a gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon, and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers' past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers begin to confront the nature of their loves and desires. Fully imagined, James Meek is the bold creator of a world we can see, hear, smell and taste. A tremendous feat of language and empathy, this novel summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own, a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history, and something we can relate to with the recent pandemic. 392pp, large paperback.