A Spell of Winter: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Product Information

This novel is set in England in the era of World War I. The war starts later in the novel, which was the first clue to the time in which the story is set. Cathy and her brother Rob live on a rural estate with their grandfather. Their mother abandoned her family and left for warmer parts of Europe. Their father's health declined after this and he was eventually committed to a sanatorium where he died. The siblings are left to their own devices with only an unlikeable governess, and a single servant to see to their needs.

Well, are you going or not?' she demanded impatiently. 'It's you that's eating these muffins, not me.' The author's name seemed really familiar to me until I realised I'd been staring at her children's work for about a year by then, but I hadn't known she'd written books for adults, too. This book is something very unusual. The title is fitting for an often chilling story that casts a spell on the willing reader. There’s an intense scene in the book after which Catherine is unsure of what really happened. The writing reflects that kind of state of mind: an uncertainty as to what is real and what is imagined. I ought to have made sure I knew more. He'd had a past, a geography of silence. None of us had ever mapped it.Because of this, and also the beauty of the prose, it reminded me very much of To the Lighthouse, which I loved the first time for its revelations, but found frustratingly hard to follow on my second read. It also reminded me of The Awakening. Like those books, this is about observations and relationships and development and the impact of trauma. Having abandoned her family, the mother remains a topic mostly avoided by the men at the estate. But Cathy has difficulty forgetting (and forgiving). After Cathy's abortion, she recalls a poem about a women's stillbirth: "A mother, a mother was born" (p. 196). What does this mean to Cathy? How does the abortion affect Cathy's bond with her mother? Contrast this with Cathy's feelings toward her father. Told in gorgeous prose, A Spell of Winter is a strangely beguiling tale that explores forbidden love, the burden of secrets, and the struggle to escape the cloying inheritance of family. What did it look like?' asked Rob. His voice had gone growly with excitement. I said nothing. I stared at Kate, and I saw white strings like roots coming out of the arm as it bounced down the wooden stairs. This feels like early Dunmore as there's an aimless drift to the story: too much is obscure and unconvincing, and the shape is constructed from Gothic tropes that feel overdone and a bit lifeless. The two children, the asylum, the predatory governess, the incest, the pregnancy and abortion, the sudden emergence into WW1 never feel organic, more dropped in precisely because they are tropes. And that means there are no emotional stakes for me, just a constructness where the workings are too visible.

One of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, Hedy Lamarr also designed a secret weapon against Nazi Germany. The other reason this book came alive for me is that Cathy was such a fascinating, sympathetic, well-developed character, and the depth of emotional complexity that Dunmore was able to excavate with this book was staggering. This book is about sexuality, societal restraints, and female agency, all examined through the lens of one woman's fraught relationship with her own family inheritance. It all sounds like a rather standard female-centric historical fiction novel, but Cathy's journey and Dunmore's psychological insights took on a hard edge that subverted all of my expectations and then some. Yes,' she went on, 'it was in my grandfather's house in Dublin. They were bringing my uncle Joseph down the stairs. Narrow, twisty stairs they put in houses where they'd given no thought to the living or the dead. You couldn't get a coffin up them. But my grandmother had kept the body too long in the house. She was mad with grief, she didn't want him to go. She kept putting more flowers in the room, shovelling flowers in on top of him to hide the smell. Then she'd be sitting with him all night long.'Her most recent prize shortlisting, in 2006, was for the Nestlé Smarties book prize for children's fiction, with The Tide Knot, the second volume in a quartet of children's novels set, like Zennor, on the glittering, mysterious Cornish coast. The move into adult fiction in no way derailed her desire to write for children; in fact, she says, "It's something that's actually become more important in the last half-dozen years. Children are a completely different audience, and I enjoy that. There's something about the way they devour books that's wonderful; you don't get many fans of adult fiction sending you beautiful drawings of your characters. And it frees you to layer on the suspense and narrative drama – to create lots of worlds, real and unreal, and move into them. But at the same time, it's just the same as adult fiction in terms of the emotions. It's not milk and water." Set largely in the build up to WWI, the story is narrated by Catherine, a young woman who feels increasingly cut off from the outside world. Abandoned by her mother as a child, embarrassed by the mental breakdown of her father that led to his hospitalisation, and ignored by the grandfather who finds too much pain in her resemblance to his absent daughter, she clings to her brother, Rob, for comfort. Hunkering down for the winter in their secluded, crumbling mansion, their mutual misplaced need for love takes their relationship down a dark and dangerous path that will pit them against the few who remain close to them. British Orange Prize–winning Dunmore ( With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) mixes the spirits of T. Hardy, E. Bronte, and D. H. Lawrence to offer up a country tale of loss, madness, and deep secrecy—all with a vividness that’s luscious and unflagging. Give it to Mrs Blazer, she'll hang it and roast you a fine saddle of hare for Sunday,' said old Semple. Theodore looked intently at it, as if he were imagining what it would taste like. We often gave them rabbits, but hare was richer, different, darker meat. Oh yes, they had to do that. You can't be burying bits of a body here and there. But for a long while no one moved, and the only sound was my grandmother drumming her heels against the flags in the scullery. Of course she knew nothing of what was happening, nor ever did, for no one told her. Not even the youngest child that was there that day.' Kate held her empty toasting-fork up to the flames, forgotten.