Harare Review of Books

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By

Jacqueline

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The Village at the Edge of Noon x Darya Bobyleva, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (tr.)

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.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.

Publisher link here.

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Response to “The Village at the Edge of Noon x Darya Bobyleva, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (tr.)”

  1. Winding Up the Week #482 – Book Jotter

    […] Retrieved from our subterranean shelves this week – 1) John Folk Williams of SciFi Mind shared his thoughts on Mohamed Kheir’s Egyptian fantasy novel Sleep Phase (“beautifully translated by Robin Moger”), in which its protagonist, Warif, having been released from prison, experiences “the world as derealized” or with a sense that nothing around him is quite real. The reader follows him “on a powerful journey through political oppression, panic attacks, uncertain memories and a collapsing identity” along the streets of a much altered Cairo. Everything about the city seems different to him and there “are foreigners everywhere, who seem to have taken over a great many jobs.” Amid these “new sensations and questions about a changed reality, Warif tries to focus on getting back his old job as a translator” but merely goes through a series of “inconclusive interviews with officials who […] probe his background rather than give him a conclusive answer”. John declares it “an unforgettable portrait of a man in limbo” and says the narrative held his “interest despite the lack of a complex plot.” Indeed, he deems it a story that “portrays a wounded mind and soul with intensity and compassion.” You can read his full review at Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir, Translated by Robin Moger. 2) Last March, Zimbabwean Jacqueline Nyath of Harare Review of Books examined Darya Bobyleva’s 2025 horror fantasy novel set in a Russian village where the residents “spend their summers resting and relaxing, gardening and repairing roofs […]”, until one midsummer morning when they wake to find the road leading out of the village is “missing.” What’s more, the “clocks have stopped working”, as has the internet, TVs and phones; in fact, all exits “lead right back” to where they started. The Village at the Edge of Noon (translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse) is “incredibly well-written” and “very funny,” says Jacqueline; its “cast of characters, and the setting are a complete delight.” She declares it “enchanting” and intends to read it “again, and again, and again.” Please read her review at The Village at the Edge of Noon x Darya Bobyleva, Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse (tr.). […]

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