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A gothic supernatural novel in the vein of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Alice in Wonderland and Sarah Waters.
London, 1901. After the death of Queen Victoria the city heaves with the uncanny and the eerie. Séances are held and the dead are called upon from darker realms.
Samuel Moncrieff, recovering from a recent tragedy of his own, meets Helena Walton-Cisneros, one of London's most reputed mediums. But Helena is not what she seems and she's enlisted by the elusive Lady Matthews to solve a twenty-year-old mystery: the disappearance of her three stepdaughters who vanished without a trace on the Norfolk Fens.
But the Fens are a liminal land, where folk tales and dark magic still linger. With locals that speak of devilmen and catatonic children found on the Broads, Helena finds the answer to the mystery leads back to where it started: Samuel Moncrieff.
About the author
Marian Womack is a bilingual writer, born in Andalusia and raised in the UK. She is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the Creative Writing Masters at Cambridge University. She works for Cambridge University libraries, and her professional background is in academic libraries, having worked at Glasgow University Library and the Bodleian. Whilst living in Spain, Marian worked as a translator, desk editor, fiction publisher, and bookseller.
Summary
"...Part Shirley Jackson's stories of inner demons, part Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...part Astrid Lindgren's faith in children's resilience and part ghost story."Enter a mysterious world in the hands of capable women. Getting drawn into this story is easy; getting out again is trickier."-BookPage
