Little Wild
The late 1930s remain fertile ground for fiction, yet Little Wild sidesteps familiar international tensions to explore the quieter, more unsettling terrain of family, memory and psychological fracture in a sultry corner of rural Suffolk in 1937. The novel is narrated by seventeen-year-old Margaret (“Meggie”) Goodall, whose early life has been marked by trauma: her mother’s suicide and a father given to drink and instability. Taken in by the affluent Winther family on whose estate she has lived, Meggie forms a close and intense bond with Joanie, the daughter of the house. Around them circles landowner Fabian Winther, whose increasingly erratic behaviour introduces a note of menace. The narrative reveals long-buried secrets and the boundaries between imagination, superstition and mental disturbance begin to blur.
As historical fiction, Little Wild wears its period lightly. Evans evokes a convincingly parched Suffolk landscape—the lingering heat of September into autumn, the sense of a world suspended before greater upheaval—without leaning heavily on historical structure. There are, however, occasional moments where the period texture falters: Meggie’s use of the term “ecosystem,” though technically current by the mid-1930s, feels strikingly modern in tone and unlikely in the mouth of a teenage narrator.
The novel’s chief strength lies in its prose; Evans writes with clarity and intelligence. Characterisation is strong, especially in the shifting, sometimes uneasy intimacy between Meggie and Joanie. If the early profusion of names momentarily disorients, the narrative soon settles into a confident rhythm. Blending elements of gothic unease with hints of witchcraft and the uncanny, Little Wild is less a conventional historical novel than a finely written study of adolescence and instability. It is an absorbing, quietly disquieting work that lingers beyond its final pages.
