384 pp. December 2, 2025, Angry Robot. Fiction.
There’s a little village outside Moscow where villagers spend their summers resting and relaxing, gardening and repairing roofs, and so on. But one morning, “right at midsummer,” June 21st, the villagers wake up to find the turning that leads out of the village … missing. Clocks have stopped working. So have the internet, TVs and phones. Paths out of the village into the nearby woods only lead right back. The woods themselves have turned dark, thick and creepy overnight. And then people start disappearing. Perhaps there’s a clue in that Sveta Beroeva, who owns the biggest dacha, yelled at her nanny the evening before?
I cannot overstate how much I loved this book. It’s incredibly well-written (and translated, by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse), very funny, and the unfolding of the mystery, the cast of characters, and the setting are a complete delight. If everyone in the village is a bit kooky, well, that’s just how dachniks are—and besides, it’s post-Soviet Russia. If some are more kooky than others—like the single young woman whose family no longer visits during the summer, the only villager who goes down to the river, where she spends long hours fishing; or the two formerly friendly neighbours who each decide the other must be a witch; the various local drunkards and eccentrics; or even Sveta herself—in the midst of a summer where there’s no sun, only a pearlescent sky, steady heat and regular rain; where fruit ripens again and again; where trees swallow up people; where there’s an invasion of cats and vines grow out of control; where the very few who make it back to the village are irrevocably changed—mostly without speech and eating ravenously … Perhaps the strangeness of the people is a perfectly normal response.
It’s not a village where weird things have never happened before; villagers know better than to go near the local river, where voices call out to them. (Valerych keeps earplugs in his pocket just for that.) Everyone knows about the folklore of the countryside—leshys, domovoys, vodyanoys, Poludnitsa. These are stories they’ve all grown up with, and they’ve come to expect a certain level of weirdness in their daily lives. This, though? This is enough to drive a whole village crazy.
Enchanting. The Village at The Edge of Noon is one I’m going to read again, and again, and again.
Thank you to Angry Robot Books and NetGalley for the DRC.
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