![]() ![]() In his pursuit to understand Alice’s visions, as well as her apparent madness, his own mental health seems to deteriorate. Stearne is haunted by his discovery of a painting and also by his scholarship into Alice Pyett, a fictionalised version of Margery Kemp. She becomes our protagonist and we grow with her as she matures and manages to understand more about her father, Edmund Stearne, the villain of the piece. I was a bit confused at first whether this novel was going to lurch back and forth between the 1960s journalist writing about Wakenhyrst and the fin-de-siecle setting but we find this is in fact just the framing for Maud’s story. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened.” The old manor house, this one being encroached on by the smell and damp of the fen, is full of great cast of characters whose lives are unravelled by the discovery of the painting. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. ![]() ![]() As the blurb describes, the house is surrounded by” a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Suffolk is an area full of myth, it’s the perfect spot for this tale of horror, both imagined and real. Wakenhyrst is a gothic mansion hidden in the fenlands of Suffolk near where I recently spent a week away so I was very happy to make this one of my first autumn reads. Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver I have written of my love of gothic fiction before and Michelle Paver’s recent bestseller is a new favourite ![]()
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