A peasant turned bowman, a minor lord's runaway daughter and a church scholar make their way from a Gloucestershire village to Calais as the Black Death comes from the other direction. Each of the three characters has their own dialect, which are loving reconstructions of the different flavours of Middle English with modernised and regularised spelling but a syntax and vocabulary of their own, showing the language's Saxon, French and Latin roots. This makes it sound like it might be just an elegant literary game - there are plenty of nods to Chaucer, Dante and Shakespeare but the real medieval literature intertext is the French allegory, The Romance of the Rose - but once you get into the language it's a surprisingly pacy and incident-packed read.

It is a bit of a challenge, and unlike many genre novels with fantasy Ye Olde Fashionéd Speake, there's no glossary in the back. It slots in neatly with a lot of my obsessions, and I loved it.

Points of comparison: a year ago I read Sylvie Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them, set in a convent in Norfolk at the same time period - it's a very different book in terms of style, but both have an uncanny ability to inhabit the past at the level of speech and gesture, and take delight in the sorts of persons left in the margins of conventional history.

The blend of literary experimentation and almost fable-like storytelling reminded me of Russell Hoban's Pilgermann and Riddley Walker, and John Gardner's Grendel (though I haven't read the latter since I was in high school).