A slice of life in a dying Shetland town. Set over the course of a year, it's about several people who live and work there- both long term and newly arrived. Know that much of the dialogue is rendered in dialect which can be difficult to read at times (sound it out) but which does add to the atmospherics. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A good read

I found comfort in the slow and steady pace of this book; and I loved the beautiful picture painted in my mind of Shetland.

Published in Great Britain by Canongate Books in 2018; paperback edition published on April 7, 2020

Life in an isolated rural area, the choices people make to embrace or abandon such a life, and whether they have the power to make choices at all, are the animating themes of The Valley at the Center of the World. The novel explores the complexity of people who live simple lives, reminding the reader that no life is ever simple. A character in the novel, reflecting on how things are changing in the valley, thinks about how things have become complicated and how she wants them to be simple again, but the changes she sees involve people, not landscapes, and people are never simple.

Two primary characters, David and Sandy, are a study in contrast. David has the serenity of certainty. He is the only remaining resident who has a long history in the valley. He knows his place in the world and that place makes him happy. Unlike his wife Mary, who viewed home as the place from which she would escape when she became an adult, David has never wanted to leave the valley. Mary admires and depends upon the stability that her husband brings, but she can’t help wondering whether she might have lived a different life, one that was not so fixed by her husband’s contentment.

David’s greatest fear is that the valley’s few remaining residents will move away, as did their daughters, Kate and Emma. Kate, like David, figured out what made her happy. She moved away, but not far, dropped out of college, got married, had kids, and causes no worries. Emma, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to know what she wants.

In that respect, Emma is like Sandy. They met in Edinburgh but Emma wanted to come home to the valley, feeling “we’re tied to the islands by elastic.” Sandy didn’t feel the pull but he went with her, moving into the house next to David’s, a house that David and Mary owned, and lived there for three years. Then Emma decided she had to go away, leaving Sandy to wonder whether he wants to stay, whether he even has a choice. Unlike David, Sandy is not certain of anything. He doesn’t know whether tending sheep offers the promise of a satisfying life. An inevitable conflict between David, who wants to bind people to the valley, and Sandy, who doesn’t want David to control his life, is the initial source of the story’s dramatic power.

Other characters, the only other residents of the valley, add to the novel’s understated drama. Terry drinks too much, sometimes with Sandy, and feels sorry for himself, bringing everyone down with his bitterness. Alice, a mystery writer whose husband died, moves to the valley as a means of escaping into the past, to a place where she used to vacation with her husband. Alice is working on a book about the valley but she can’t quite decide what she wants to say, what she wants the book to be. She’s trying to understand Maggie, who lived a long life in the valley, but the letters Maggie wrote are all about work and weather. According to David, “wark and wadder”sums up her life. Perhaps thinking of her own life, Alice wonders whether that is enough.

Sandy’s confusion heightens when, after he moves into Maggie's old house, a young couple moves into the house he formerly occupied with Emma. His attraction to Jo, Ryan’s wife, is mutual and uncomfortable. He feels torn when Liz, his mother, suddenly reappears after a four-year absence from his life. He resents her presence as much as he craves it. Liz’s backstory explains why she found it impossible for her to stay with Sandy’s father or to be a proper mother to Sandy. She loves Sandy, “just not in the way that was required of her.”

Characters who grew up in the valley have their own way of speaking. When Alice asks David what kind of stories Maggie told, he replies: “Well, du kens, juist stories aboot fok. Aboot da valley. My parents, her parents, idder fok at used to bide around here.” Malachy Tallack provides a glossary of Scottish dialect, but it’s not really necessary. If you can hear the voices in your head, you’ll understand what they’re saying. Hearing those voices is one of the pleasures of reading the novel.

Much like the book Alice is writing, The Valley at the Centre of the World is as much about the place as the people who inhabit it. The valley sees little change. It is a place that will endure, as it always has, untroubled by urban bustle, until its few sheep farmers finally die or move away. Yet it is the depth of characterization that makes the novel special.

The novel is quiet but eventful. The story encourages readers to get inside the skin of each character, to wonder what will finally become of them. Mary might wonder about alternative lives, but she knows she is fundamentally happy with what she has. Terry is passive, “as though his whole movement through life had been guided by decisions were not his own,” and unlikely to change. Sandy and Alice have the strongest temptations to leave, but will they? “I’m no sure what I want, exactly,” Sandy tells Jo. “I used to ken, but now I don’t.” Alice’s family wants her to come home. She isn't sure she has any reason to stay, but the more she works on her book about the valley, the more it feels like home.

The valley never changes, but people do. Some people fear change, others see no need for it. Whether the characters will find ways to be content with their lives, by embracing or rejecting change, is the fascinating question that invites the reader to imagine how the characters' lives might turn out.

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Not a first visit to Shetland islands for me. No, first time was with the eponymous BBC show. One with relatively forgettable prototypical small town cop sort of theme, but absolutely unforgettable scenery. Well, this time returning, a proper literary armchair travel, is much much lovelier. Something about the quiet beauty of this book really resonated with me. And quiet it is indeed, nothing much occurs, just a small cast of characters navigated the vagaries of life and specifically life in a small isolated community with inviting views and forbidding weather. At the centre of the centre of the valley is David and Mary, an older couple, who are the soul of the place. The person older than them has recently passed away, their daughters left, although the boyfriend of one of them chose to stay behind and tries to make a go of it as a crofter with David’s support. Seriously, though, not a plot driven novel, so let’s talk about all the other things that make it great. The descriptions…ah, the author really does justice to his setting and you as a reader can get transported through sheer power of written word all the way to a subarctic archipelago in the Northern isles of Scotland. Pure literary magic. And then there’s the language…which actually initially almost had me pass this book by, all the mentions of phonetic dialect use, that can so really difficult to read and enjoy, but here somehow it works so well. It is mostly David who speaks the proper Shetlandic and though on the paper it looks positively wooly (and why wouldn’t it, given the number of sheep around) when you read it somehow it comes alive, you can actually hear David as it were and it helps immerse you in the atmosphere of the place all the more. In fact, David is perfect stand in for his beloved isle, he is constant, fair, kind, good person, good worker, loves the place he lives in completely and has no desire to be anywhere other than. Wherein his wife has come to love it through association and his not quite son in law is trying it out for size, for David there has never been a question about it, the man knows where he belongs. And through this book you might appreciate why. The sea alone, to be surrounded by it, even the Northern waters, there’s something majestic about that. So there you have it, a lovely novel with lovely characters set in a stunning place of natural beauty. It’s a sort of book to disappear into for a while and with the world being what it is, why wouldn’t you want to. I enjoyed this one very much. Such an engaging reading experience. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This book was so good. I didn't to put it down! The characters were well rounded, and the storyline sucked you into it and made you feel like you were really there. The author did an great job telling this story.