“in places like Hope-under-Barrow, people don’t like newcomers. They think we’re ignorant at best and, at worst, I’d probably rather not know. Though I suppose we are ignorant, in some ways. Ben and I can’t be expected to know how things have worked in this village for the past century or more…”
Of a British population of 69 million people, 83 per cent live in an urban area. Of the 10 million or so living in rural settlements, a quarter are over 65-years-old. Very few of us have lived in the cliched village of legend, yet we all know it so well. We’ve been saturated in the insularity, the tumbledown architecture, the class-structured grandeur of manors or the squalor of paupers’ farmhouses, the local church with the inevitably eerie graveyard and nearby vicarage.
Heather Davey’s novel The Memory Tree dives unashamedly into such cliches, centring on a small family — the vicar, his wife and son — and their arrival in a new parish with its own well-indented rituals. The book’s gift is taking such familiar elements then winding them tight into a choking circle of no escape. Other characters move into and back beyond that circle as if passing through an impenetrable veil, leaving us with a claustrophobic inability to discern their intentions or what part they might play in the unfolding events.
Kate, our modern-day protagonist, and Octavia, our correspondent from the past, rarely move beyond the vicarage and the graveyard visible from its windows. In 1866, Hope-under-Barrow is the quintessential picturesque nowhere one might visit for a day or pass through on the road to someplace else, nothing more. Beyond the edge of the village, ancient barrow burial sites mark the landscape for geeky tourists to genuflect over — one such lies beneath the yew tree in the graveyard — otherwise daily life is a pub, corner shop, school, and a recreation ground with broken goalposts, the latter an apparent metaphor for a game with no end and players going nowhere. Only the March family farm buckling under the burdens of subsistence level farming is worthy of note.
Octavia is a rambunctious young teen surviving in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Her father, the Reverend Phineas Kibble, unable to breach masculine mores of the time, has suppressed his intense grief into a densely compacted and combustible barrel of confusion lodged within him, at permanent risk of unpredictable explosion. Nanny Butterworth tends to the house and gives Octavia at least once source of affection. Then, under the yew tree, Octavia encounters a shadowy, otherworldly figure, as well as meeting Alice March, a new friend. Octavia’s insatiable curiosity about this tree, around which she can inhale memories that are not her own, leads her on into mystery.
Kate, meanwhile, is a white-hot electric wire scalding, sparking and shocking upon contact with her surroundings. The causes are many. There’s the imposition and apparent disapproval of the staunchly traditional locals who walk unbidden into her home each day; her husband’s dismissal of her artistic wishes and independence, his constant elevation of his own requirements; the loss of home and its replacement with a strange house where even the water can’t be trusted; her three-year-old son’s increasingly bizarre behaviour after his first encounter with death; the whispers of the supernatural centred around the yew tree and whoever is buried beneath it; and, under it all, her own quiet burden of guilt growing to an intense clamour.
The locals are insistent that if the correct rituals on Barrow Man Day are not observed then misfortune will strike the village, particularly its children. Grief is repeatedly shown to carry a price when it cannot be cleanly relinquished or expressed. In such situations, lies grow in power and appeal, turning good people toward the dark and toward actions soured by falsehood that can only lead to more grief and further loss. The importance is pressed upon us of the honest expulsion of the ghosts each character is saddled with, of forgiveness from without or within, if anyone is to have a future.
Setting us up on the well-trodden ground of a rural churchyard surfaces all kinds of stories within our minds. Davey toys with such expectations, letting us believe that this is one type of ghost story or another, or that the threat might be more corporeal than it might seem; the push and pull of the otherworldly and the parochial yanks us in different directions, leaving us constantly uncertain what it is that Kate or Octavia must contend with in order to survive.
Chopping back and forth between 2026 and 1866, and the pace of events unfolding in each era, creates a breathlessness as we’re plunged rapidly through multiple layers of enigma. It belies the sedate pace of the Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories to which The Memory Tree nods but from which it is clearly distinguishable. There’s also an ultimate kindness to the tale marking it out as a chiller with a heart; it does not wallow in inhumanity and always retains a morally centred belief that the characters deserve better than their suffering and that they will find relief.
WRITER
Heather Davey
PUBLISHER
Titan Books
RELEASE
29 September 2026
