Blackmoor, By Edward Hogan

Vincent Cartwright lives with his father, George, close to the site of an abandoned Derbyshire mining village, Blackmoor. George is continually at war with the world. Vincent has a hard time at school, where the other kids call him "bird man" because of his passion for bird-watching.

All of this unhappiness has its roots in what happened to Vincent's mother. Her fate is revealed early on in a newspaper cutting ("A Blackmoor woman jumped to her death from the second-floor window of her house last Thursday"), but the true reasons for it lie in how the people of Blackmoor turned against her. Clever and outspoken, an albino who liked to dress in her own unusual creations, she was persecuted like a witch.

There's a subtle magic to Hogan's prose, and a passionate concern for the part of the world where this novel is based, which invites comparison with D H Lawrence – but that would be lazy. This novel isn't perfect but it has confidence, mystery and an entrancing sense of itself.