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Havoc, In Its Third Year
A Novel
by Ronan Bennett


8.0

based on 12 reviews
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based on 2 votes
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This historical novel is set in early 17th-century England, where town coroner and governor John Brigge is faced with a crisis of conscience and a clash of religions brought on by his investigation into the murder of an infant.

Simon & Schuster, 256 pages
09/02/2004
$24.00

ISBN: 0743258568

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
Historical Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Daily Telegraph David Robson

A thrillingly satisfying piece of work.

The Independent Stevie Davies

Searingly powerful.

The Spectator Ian Thomson

There isn't a bogus sentence in the book, as Ronan Bennett writes with an invigorating plainness and, at times, a poetry that consciously evokes the King James Bible.

Washington Post Carolyn See

Bennett is a novelist as well as a moralist, so he shapes his tale as a grisly murder mystery, while doing his learned best to imagine what it must have been like to live in that faraway place, during those very hard times.

Kirkus Reviews

A fresh portrait of a familiar troubled era, but, careful reconstruction that it is, it works better as history, falling rather flat as fiction. [1 Aug 2004, p.700]

Los Angeles Times Merle Rubin

Plunging us into a somber world of uncertainty, fears and portents, Bennett succeeds in making the vanished past vivid -- and in making us wonder if there are not perhaps some parallels between that time and our own. [1 Sep 2004, p.E10]

Publishers Weekly

Marvelously told... this is one of the more rewarding historical novels to come along in some time. [2 Aug 2004, p.49]

San Francisco Chronicle David Kipen

An occasional reliance on doggedly cinematic structure hobbles the novel, only to disappear at the climax, when it might conceivably have shored matters up. Yet the power of Bennett's allegory holds and builds.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Mark Frutkin

Ultimately, it is Bennett's story-telling power that proves the strength of this novel, and brings alive, in rich detail, the world of 17th-century England.

The Guardian Kathryn Hughes

Wonderfully done.

Daily Telegraph Benjamin Markovits

Bennett is a deft and powerful storyteller.... Yet the novel just falls short of its promise.

London Review Of Books Colin Burrow

It has moments of real and zealous beauty, even if there are also in it quite a few of the things that you just have to bite your lip over and bear when reading a historical novel.

The average user rating for this book is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Wendy S gave it a9:
Fantastic language and a gripping read

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Havoc, In Its Third Year A Novel by Ronan Bennett

Havoc, In Its Third Year
A Novel
by Ronan Bennett