Immensely sad, quite beautiful , and deserves to be read by all lovers of good novel ― The Bookseller --This text refers to the paperback edition. I enjoyed reading this a lot and this probably doesn't say as much as it should - even though I read a lot, there's very few books that can make me settle down with one for hours, or make me think about it when I'm not reading it.

A less experienced author may have turned this into a "romantic melodrama", but Delbanco stated that Dunmore's "authoritative telling" has produced a "haunt[ing]" tale. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The first thing seemed to come out of nowhere and I had to reread the scene about three times to make sure that yes, that is indeed what it said. Dunmore presents the reader with a masterpiece of characterization full of human intrigue and desperation, and this is the area in which she succeeds without question. I willed the snow to lie for ever, and I turned over and buried my head under the pillow so as not to hear the chuckle and drip of thaw….Since I’ve now done both this week (apologies to my baffled friend who had to sit through the strange explanations), I’m ready to cast off this hallucinatory novel and remember it fondly as one of the odd little black sheep who sometimes wander onto my bookshelves with no discernible origin. They are brought up by servants in the house of their grandfather, an Irishman who made his fortune somehow and is known in the neighbourhood as ‘the man from nowhere’. When both children were young, their mother ran away, Something their father was not able to accept and it eventually leads to madness.

I wanted the thermometer to drop lower and lower until not even a trace of mercury showed against the figures. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England.This is a novel of forbidden love, family secrets and how Cathy gradually becomes a woman and learns to understand what drove her mother away. Her family is falling apart as fast as the manor they live in, leaving Cathy and her brother Rob to parse rumors and secrets for the truth of their missing parents. I had such a strange reaction to this book: I loved this more than anything I have read in a long time, but when I started thinking about writing this review, I had the hardest time putting my finger on why.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels.

With the exception of a few bumbling sentences (such as " Elsie shudders exaggeratedly as she goes away in the early December dusk"), Dunmore's craft exudes an easy rhythm and dips in and out of the past and present with a fluidity akin to waves gently lapping at the shore. Rob just flounces off to Canada for no particular reason, and then he comes back and goes off to the war and we never find out what happened to him? It’s a tragic tale of the lasting effects one person’s actions can have on another, and of coming of age in a rapidly changing world.