by Isabel Colegate
“The Shooting Party” is a relatively short book at just 195 pages, it is rich with characters so vividly drawn that each could have been the subject of a novel on their own. The descriptions of Oxfordshire, reminiscent of Hardy, are rendered with a delicate touch. Colegate used a fine brush to subtly bring characters to life—a line here, a dab there—shaping them with depth and dimension until they felt like real people. I felt as if I were right beside them: in the meadows, the woods, the drawing room; witnessing the hundreds of pheasants fall, smelling the gunsmoke, sensing the impending dissolution of the old world society. Set over just one weekend, the novel captures the enduring divide between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless.
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