When I was offered a chance to review The Hemlock Cure, I jumped at it. Entirely based off the fact that as a teenager, one New Years Eve, my dad decided to drag us to the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. I think he felt it would be educational to learn about the place that was destroyed by the plague in the 1600s.

One thing about the visit that has stayed with me this day is the smell and the feeling it gave me. Now there is absolutely no chance that there was still any rotting flesh still there but I still felt I could smell it. I’ve never really mentioned it to anyone because there was one time in school that I said the drama studio smelt like death and everyone seemed to think I was weird.

Yet here I am reading this book and the character of Mae says that there’s this very smell in Eyam and that she can smell colour too. Well it definitely felt like a nasty shade of green that day. I still get it when I’m sick and now associate it with slow cooked stews. But I digress.

The Hemlock Cure is an imagining of what really happened when Eyam put itself on lockdown when the plague reached them from London in a package of cloth. (Is historical fact a spoiler?) How to save it spreading to the cities around them such as Sheffield they sacrificed themselves.

We then have themes of misogyny against women, comparisons with the pandemic of recent times, medicine of the 1600s and how this faired against changes in faith at the time. How a mother could be held in suspicion if her child was still born.

I was gripped this. This time still fascinates me and Joanne Burn really brings Eyam to life in The Hemlock Cure