Sea storm stirs superstitions
HISTORICAL EITHNE FARRY THE MERCIES by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Picador £14.99, 352 pp) IN STARKLY beautiful sentences Kiran Millwood Hargrave, up until now a bestselling children’s author, unspools the terrifying story of a real witch-hunt that took place on an isolated island off the coast of Norway in 1617.
On Christmas Eve, a storm at sea drowns 40 fishermen, including 20-year-old Maren’s father, brother and fiancé. The island women, grief-stricken, are left to fend for themselves in a hostile winter landscape.
In the tight-knit community, suspicion and superstition divide the island’s inhabitants. Worse still is the arrival of fervent witch-hunter Absalom Cornet. Determined to stamp out the pagan ways of the past, Cornet’s menacing actions ratchet up the tension for Maren and Cornet’s young wife, Ursula, as they attempt to carve out a life in an atmosphere that’s clouded by danger and fear. THE FOUNDLING by Stacey Halls (Manilla Press £12.99, 384 pp)
STACEY HALLS’ vibrant second novel is packed to the gills with the teeming, tempestuous life of Georgian London, from the fishmongers of Billingsgate to the high society ladies of Bloomsbury.
At the heart of this tender, theatrical story are workingclass shrimp seller Bess Bright, and well-to-do widow Alexandra Callard.
Heartbroken Bess is attempting to discover the fate of the tiny baby she left, six years ago, at elegant Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, who was claimed by a mysterious person pretending to be her.
Determined to recover her child, she works as a nursemaid to Alexandra’s six-yearold daughter Charlotte, who bears a startling resemblance to Bess.
With its pitch-perfect prose, slightly marred by an implausible plot, Halls’ story is a hugely engaging read.
THE ILLNESS LESSON by Clare Beams (Doubleday £14.99, 288 pp)
CAROLINE HOOD witnessed her father Samuel’s first failure — a utopian, self-sufficient community in rural Massachusetts which disbanded when the crops didn’t flourish but suggestions of impropriety did, leading one of the founders to write The Darkening
Glass, a sensational novel about the experiment.
Now Samuel has a new plan — a progressive girls’ school, an adventurous undertaking in conservative 1870s New England. Girls arrive, including Eliza, daughter of the The Darkening Glass author, whose disruptive fainting fits, mystery rashes and night wanderings also plague the other girls.
Diagnosed as hysterical by a sinister doctor, whose ‘treatment’ amounts to sexual violation, this disturbing novel slowly builds an atmosphere of claustrophobia and unease, which is somewhat spoiled by an abrupt ending.