Promotional Information

Catherine and her brother, Rob, don't know why they have been abandoned by their parents.

About the Author

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children's author and poet. She published twelve novels including Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the inaugural Orange Prize in 1996; 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 the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. She was posthumously awarded the Costa 2017 prize for her poetry collection Inside the Wave.

Reviews

A marvellous novel about forbidden passions and the terrible consequences of thwarted love. Dunmore is one of the finest English writers
*Daily Mail*

A hugely involving story which often stops you in your tracks with the beauty of its writing
*Observer*

An electrifying and original talent, a writer whose style is characterized by a lyrical, dreamy intensity
*Guardian*

Tense, dark and intensely gripping . . . written so seductively that passages sing out from the page
*Sunday Times*

Her prose is poetic in its emotional range and intensity
*TLS*

Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary Gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. In true Gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. . . . A finely crafted, if disturbing, literary page-turner
*Publishers Weekly*

It bears the distinctive lyrical beauty of its predecessors . . . Helen Dunmore is an unusually fine writer. There is a strong and sensuous magic to A Spell of Winter
*Gill Hornby in The Times*

One of our finest writers
*Philip Pullman*

Immensely sad, quite beautiful, and deserves to be read by all lovers of good novel
*The Bookseller*