I HAD NEVER heard of Sarah Moss until I saw a good review of this in...I think it was LRB. Probably. In any case, my city library had a copy, so I gave it a shot, and it's good.
Quite short, under 200 pages, but feels well-rounded. The book is set during the course of a single day at a lake in Scotland surrounded by vacation rentals. Each chapter gives the point of view of one or another person who happens to be staying in one of the cabins (cottages?) this particular week, with short inter-chapters devoted to the description of the lake.
The close-third-person/free indirect style of the chapters present a range of characters who vary in age and circumstances, so on one level we have a Winesburg, Ohio sort of novel. At the same time, almost everyone is feeling provoked by the eastern European vacationers in one of the cabins, who are playing loud music late into the night, so on another level we seem to have a Brexit allegory.
You don't need to be too canny to divine that the last chapter will turn on a confrontation between the British vacationers and the people variously imagined by the other characters as Polish, Romanian, or Ukrainian...and sure enough, that's what happens. It does not go down at all the way I was expecting.
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