An extraordinary debut novel … It feels both ancient – drawing on deep seams of myth and folklore – and strikingly contemporary, pushing at the edges of what we mean when we call a book a novel. In Folk, Zoe Gilbert has made a thing of strange and enduring beauty

Alex Preston, Financial Times

Folk is a special book: immersive and dripping with life, each story a spell, an allegory, a dark, smoky poem divined from the landscape of our ancient kingdom … It reads like a dream that, once visited, is difficult to leave behind

Ben Myers, Guardian

Genuinely original, disturbing, beautiful and gripping ... Folk can be read as a map of the British mythic imagination: of the river under the river. Starkly original and expertly written, it draws you, like a faerie song, into a kingdom from which you may never escape, and may not want to

New Statesman

Dazzling and unsettling, much like the best and darkest of fairy tales

Times Literary Supplement

A dark, often discomforting debut … Gilbert's sensuous prose conjures fantastical figures including a man born with a wing for an arm, and a girl who's abducted by a water bull … Bewitching

The Best New Fiction, Mail on Sunday

Folk is absolutely stunning. I loved it. With gorgeous, incantatory prose, it submerges you in a mysterious and utterly compelling world. Its illumination lingers long after you close the book

Madeline Miller, Orange Prize-winning author of The Song of Achilles