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Villager

Tom Cox

Book cover: Villager

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.

In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill and writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a cult following. Two decades later, some teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor.

Tom Cox’s masterful debut novel synthesises his passion for music, nature and folklore into a psychedelic and enthralling exploration of village life and the countryside that sustains it.

Paperback

ISBN: 9781800756076

Published: September 11, 2025

Ebook

ISBN: 9781800756083

Published: June 19, 2025

Book cover: Villager

Category:
Fiction

Reviews for Villager

‘An exquisitely detailed, many-voiced tale of people, place and folklore … a communication with lost voices rich in wonder, longing and exalted psychedelic flight’ – Mojo

I was swept along in this novel’s current, watching a landscape unfold to reveal the lives hidden in its crevices. A joyous tumble of animism, love, music and mystery that beautifully balances awe and irreverence: Villager left me with a sense of an ancient longing that is hard to shake off’ – Zoe Gilbert, author of Folk

‘I gallumphed through the pages of Villager as though it was on fire … Funny, thought-provoking and astoundingly clever’ – Adele Nozedar, author of The Hedgerow Handbook

Villager is a marvellously inventive and imaginative fiction. A tremendous novel’ – William Boyd

‘Tom Cox’s books are hedgerows. All about the journey and not the destination. They delicately link one stunning viewpoint to another whilst providing nourishment for the heart and soul, a safe haven for a host of endangered fantasies, musings and stories’ – Alice Lowe

‘Tom Cox is a master of effortless, fluid storytelling and Villager is alive with both gnawing edge and Cox’s signature flavour of clipped, pragmatic humour which is perfectly juxtaposed with the unbounded imagination of Villager‘s world. It is a thrilling, comforting and entirely unique read, challenging the reader’s sense of both what is familiar and what is alien. It’s tender and dark and strangely comforting. I loved it’ – Laura Kennedy, Irish Times/Sunday Times

,An extraordinary book … [Tom Cox] is policing that interesting boundary between what is folklore, what is actual history, and what is natural history’ – John Mitchinson, Backlisted podcast

‘Tom is such an original mind, and brave in his approach to writing, so it’s no surprise at all that he has written a novel that surprises, delights and fizzes with imagination’ – Sathnam Sanghera

‘A glorious ramble … This is an epic, oddball soap opera soundtracked by folk music, birdsong and the rattle of hedgerows against car windows … Its psychedelic tangle suggests that our short lives can nourish the landscape, if we watch our step’ – Guardian

Author

Tom Cox

Author image not available for Tom Cox

Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com

Author image not available for Tom Cox