Check out the starred PW review of Jem Poster's Courting Shadows, due out in early 2008.
"In Poster’s dazzling debut, set amid the Victorian gloom of 1881, snobbish John Stannard leads the restoration of a small,architecturally undistinguished church in a remote British village. It’s unglamorous work that the young architect thinks beneath him, what with having to disinter corpses, fend off enraged townsfolk and dole out 19th-century workers comp to injured laborers. Further complicating Stannard’s effort is the church’s curate, Mr. Banks, who seeks to preserve all of what Stannard aims to modernize and improve, no matter how rotten or broken. The debate between the two men escalates when, stripping plaster from a wall, one of Stannard’s employees uncovers a Doom Painting—a folk mural blending Christian and pagan influences dating from medieval times. At the same time, the buttoned-up Stannard begins to experience previously unknown passion, falling for the beautiful 19-year-old Ann Rosewell, an enigmatic local woman. The variously grotesque characters are spot-on, as is the static, lugubrious setting. Poster, who has worked as an archeologist, is formidable in his command of Victorian architecture and restoration, and uses his skills to construct an unlikely, subtext-ridden conflict—over the possibility of restoration to some original state of grace—that is wholly involving from start to finish. (Feb.)"
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