Edmund wants nothing to do with it, but it seems to want something with him. Whilst walking through the local church yard Edmund spots an eye in the undergrowth, part of a ‘doom’ painting of hell that has lived in the church for years. After Maud’s mother dies in childbirth, Maud becomes more isolated before, until she discovers her father’s diary – a window to his innermost thoughts.

In the isolated Wake’s End, a manor house outside of Wakenhyrst and surrounded by the wilds of the Fen, Maud is particularly affected by her father’s tyrannical rule. In 1906, Edmund Stearn runs his family with an iron grip.

Gothic thriller about the descent into insanity.I love gothic thrillers, and this had all the eerie earmarks of a true gothic story, mixed with a curious format that had me fascinated from the first page. I’ve been trying to read more of Waterstones’ book of the month picks, because they’ve yet to steer me wrong, so I picked up Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst and it completely suckered me in. Behind me something rustled and I saw the reeds part for some unseen creature. Revisiting M R James territory with a modern feminist sensibility, Wakenhyrst is weirdly compelling.The reeds stood tall and dead: I had the oddest feeling they wanted me gone. It is more difficult to pull this off at novel-length than in a short story, and harder now than it was 100 years ago, but she succeeds. “As in Dark Matter, Paver manages the balance between outright supernaturalism and the suggestion that the horrors are psychological in origin with great skill. Selected by The Times to be their Book of the Month “A gripping ghost story… This is a brilliantly atmospheric read (be warned: it’s also terrifying!) with a brave, forward-thinking heroine I loved.” Wakenhyrst is a more-than-worthy addition to their ranks.” Starting with her 2010 novel, Dark Matter, and continuing with 2016’s Thin Air, Paver has been writing ghost stories distinguished by their vividly evoked settings and the struggles of their protagonists. Benson filtered through a 21st-century sensibility.Ĭoncise and intense, filled with references to the tradition of English ghost stories, Paver’s novel succeeds on a number of levels. It’s an utter triumph of a book, a pitch-perfect evocation of the stories of M.R.

Wakenhyrst novel