Description
The Confession of Jack Straw by Simone Zelitch
ISBN 978-0930773182
Winner of the University of Michigan’s prestigious Hopwood Award for Major Fiction
The Confession of Jack Straw is both a political novel and literary novel of great style and humanity. Taking the form of a confession of one of the leaders of the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, the novel accompanies the peasants as they travel through southern England, gathering followers, opening prisons, killing lawyers and telling stories. Simone Zelitch’s first novel, it marks her as a writer already of the first rank.
Reviews
“In most novels about the Middle Ages, the deck is all face cards. “Jack Straw” is rare and admirable in its uncompromising, unpatronizing identification with a peasant–an intelligent, vulnerable man caught up in the dream of equality that flared into the Peasant Revolt. The novel lets the reader stand at that crossroads of politics and mysticism and see 1776, 1848, 1917, Tianenmen Square–the same dream, the same betrayal. A very moving, honest book.”
—Ursula Le Guin
“A fast-paced, intriguing account of the failed Peasant Revolt in 14th-century England: First- novelist Zelitch provides a rendering that is evocative and plausible, as well as convincing in its historical sweep . . . Zelitch offers a satisfying variety of incident, with enough texture and historical detail–costume, festivity, songs–to evoke the medieval milieu. The Middle Ages are rendered not on silver platters or thrones but on the dusty roads and straw beds of peasants, who are given center state here, not limited to comic relief.”
—Kirkus Review
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