Isabel Colegate
The Shooting Party a slender novel at just 195 pages, brims with characters so vividly drawn that each could sustain a novel of their own. Colegate paints Oxfordshire with a delicacy reminiscent of Hardy—meadows, woods, and manor rooms rendered in fine, precise strokes. With a single line here, a deft dab there, she brings her cast into full dimension until they feel unmistakably real. I found myself among them: in the drawing rooms, in the fields and woods, watching pheasants shot and fall in hundreds, breathing in the gunsmoke, and sensing the imminent decline of this old world. Set over the course of a single weekend, the novel captures the enduring divide between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless–with a quiet, devastating clarity.
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