Now that we’re getting back in the swing of things, I have decided to return to my previous practice of writing a Sunday book review.  This obviously fell by the wayside during the European election campaign and I now feel energised enough to blog about things other than politics, especially my great hobby, books.

Ross Raisin’s “God’s Own Country” is one of the strangest stories I have read for a long time.  Set in the Yorkshire moors it tells of a teenage farmer’s only son who takes up with the daughter of posh incoming folk – towns as he calls them – who arrives in the house next door to his.  Having run away together, when the girl wants to go home, our anti-hero through whose eyes and mouth the story is told, assaults and ties the girl up, only to eventually be arrested by the police.  The situation is made much worse by the fact that he has previous, having been expelled from school for attacking a female class mate.

Yet this brief outline is by no means the whole story.  Our hero is a complicated young man who protests his innocence at all times, and there are occasions when you actually believe him.  The language is colourful with original twists, such as the nicknames he gives everyone, Chickenhead for girl’s mother being just one.

It’s a short book which is compulsive reading – a real page turner, though not in the conventional sense.  This book is not a thriller, but does present a deep psycholigical mystery, a mystery which takes some unravelling.