A Spell of Winter - Hardcover

Dunmore, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754016552 ISBN 13: 9780754016557

Publisher: Chivers, 2001

Synopsis

Helen Dunmore's most celebrated work -- never before published in the United States -- is a compelling turn-of-the-century tale of innocence corrupted by secrecy and the grace of second chances. Bearing the distinctive lyrical beauty of her predecessors, A Spell of Winter asserts Dunmore's claim to the territories staked out by some of the great nineteenth-century novelists. But with a strong, sensuous magic and a modern understanding of love that is all her own, Dunmore defies all the old formulas. Catherine and her brother, Rob, do not know why they have been abandoned by their parents. In the house of their grandfather, "the man from nowhere," they forge a passionate refuge for themselves against the terror of family secrets, and while the world outside moves to the brink of war, their sibling love becomes fraught with dangers. But as Catherine fights free of the past, the spell of winter that has held her in its grasp begins to break. The novel's rich imagery moves between the stark, harsh winter world that Catherine loves and the warm summers she loathes, when the air is thick with the scent of roses and painful memories. Through decades of changing seasons, the two siblings mature within an enclosed world in which they are virtually imprisoned by servants who guard the mysteries of their heritage. In different ways, first Rob and later Catherine will dare to break through the wall that encircles their perversely stifled lives to move toward heartbreaking but final release. Dunmore's hypnotic, affecting prose is filled with unexpected tenderness and moments of beauty as she expertly evokes a melancholy era with a wholly original edge and keenness. A Spell of Winter recasts the Gothic pastoral novel with breathtaking contemporary insight and explores with astonishing perception the moral complexities of human choice and action.

About this title

About the Author:

Helen Dunmore has published nine novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. She is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer.

From Publishers Weekly:

Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family for a bohemian life on the Continent. Their father, whose mental state always has been slightly precarious, is committed to an asylum in the country. The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. In true gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both. Kate makes the first crack in their hermetically sealed world, which World War I eventually bursts wide open. With Kate's departure for Canada and Rob's for the front, destitute times at home force Cathy into self-reliance. It's only after she's redeemed by hardship that she's given a second chance to be redeemed by love. Though the setting is classic gothic, the novel is peculiarly modern with its precise, unforgiving depictions of childhood and madness, its dark sensuality and surprising, artful use of metaphor. The intensity and darkness of the world Dunmore creates teeters between gripping and overwrought; some may find the story heavy-handed. Still, Dunmore's keen, close writing is deserving of Britain's prestigious Orange Prize, which the novel won when it was first published in the U.K. in 1995, and most will enjoy the book as a finely crafted, if disturbing, literary page-turner. (Feb.)Forecast: Dunmore's stock has been steadily rising with the publication in the U.S. of her last three novels (Your Blue-Eyed Boy; Talking to the Dead; With Your Crooked Heart); demand for this earlier, career-establishing work should be strong.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chivers
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0754016552
• ISBN 13: 9780754016557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416