Wakenhyrst

Michelle Paver
Head of Zeus

1906: A large manor house, Wake's End, sits on the edge of a bleak Fen, just outside the town of Wakenhyrst. It is the home of Edmund Stearn and his family – a historian, scholar and land-owner, he's an upstanding member of the local community. But all is not well at Wake's End. Edmund dominates his family tyrannically, in particular daughter Maud. When Maud's mother dies in childbirth and she's left alone with her strict, disciplinarian father, Maud's isolation drives her to her father's study, where she happens upon his diary.

In a lonely house on the Suffolk Fens live Maud and her repressive, domineering and arrogant father, Edmund.  Upon the death of her mother Maud is left bereft of compassionate company and learns to both fend for herself and to exact sweet revenge on the man who she blames for her beloved mother death.  Into the mix is thrown her father's discovery of a, as he sees it, malevolent mediaeval painting in the local church that exacerbates his slide into madness and murder.

Paver has managed that most tricky of literary feats and written a supernatural novel that maintains it's aura of eerie menace and it's ambiguity throughout.  The gothic menace of the desolate house and the forbidding fens with its buried secrets and it's hidden depths loom over the story and contribute to Edmund's inexorable slide into insanity. Maud is gloriously malicious and uncompromisingly resolute in her revenge whilst never losing our sympathy, such is the callousness of her upbringing, yet we are left wondering if it is only Maud who is conspiring against Edmund or if he is correct and there are supernatural forces ranged against him.

With a successful YA series and several other novels with a supernatural bent behind her Paver has honed her storytelling and her lively prose and rock solid storytelling kept me hooked throughout and left an impression that has lasted long after I closed the final page.

Buy it here - Wakenhyrst

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