'The Trouble with Goats and Sheep' by Joanna Cannon

This is an example of a rare but wonderful thing, namely a debut novel written by someone of mature years which became a bestseller. It was published in 2016 and the author is a practicing psychologist who, I would guess is about the same age as me, because the principal character in her book is a girl who was ten during the hot summer of 1976, as indeed was I.

It took me some time to get into this because there are a large number of characters, pretty well all very English, who live alongside one another in 'The Avenue' which is located in a very typical suburb of an unnamed East Midlands town. The title of the novel is a touch misleading, as the story has nothing whatever to do with sheep or goats. This is instead a metaphor for people, goats standing out from the crowd of sheep, sometimes for positive reasons and sometimes for very negative ones.

The story is quite complicated - or at least seems so until things are resolved at the end. The starting point is the disappearance of one Margaret Creasy, a neighbour of the other characters who lives at Number 8 with her soon to be distraught husband, John. Before long the police get involved and two ten year olds called Grace and Tilly decide to spend their summer holidays investigating. This is, however, no conventional cosy crime murder mystery told by an unreliable narrator. There is much more to it than that. It becomes clear that this group of neighbours harbours all manner of private and collective secrets going back some years which we gradually get to know about. They are not, on the whole, a very pleasant bunch, being rather stupid and credulous people who have behaved badly.

What makes the book worth reading is the quality of the writing, which is excellent, and what we must now (I guess) consider its 'period setting'. There are lots of references to the fashion of the time, the television programmes, the food we all ate, the technology we used and figures such as Harold Wilson and Brian Clough. The smallness of the lives we led then, as compared to now, is cleverly evoked as well as the social norms.

This was an enjoyable and quite original book that deserves its popularity.