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

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Generally it's a somber and melancholic story that slowly unwinds to create some intriguing yet emotionally consuming twists (it's not for the faint hearted! Her family is falling apart as fast as the manor they live in, leaving Cathy and her brother Rob to parse rumors and secrets for the truth of their missing parents. Catherine, the protagonist, grows up a closely matched pair with her brother, Rob, all the more so as their mother has left, their father is institutionalized, and their grandfather is remote. It’s a sorrowful picture, and although I often struggled to empathise, I was still dragged under the melancholy veil as we both suffocated through this life.

Cathy has a suitor, in the form of a rich neighbour; while Rob has the beautiful Livvy - as light as Cathy is dark. A Spell of Winter is one of those novels that pulls you in with its secrets and sense of impending doom. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. Comment: The spine or cover may be slightly worn but the book is otherwise in good condition and will provide thought provoking read!

As the book progresses, nature begins to reclaim the old mansion, and Catherine finds satisfaction and meaning through her work on the land.

It’s all very ephemeral, held together with a precarious structure, like a cobweb you see only when the mist settles on it. When both children were young, their mother ran away, Something their father was not able to accept and it eventually leads to madness. When Cathy finds herself alone in the mansion, everyone else long gone, nature starts to reclaim it, room by room. I also wish we’d gotten more answers from the end of the book – I don’t mind open endings, but I thought there were too many things we never found out.

I don't know why but I avoided it for years, thinking it would be heavy historical fiction and I much prefer contemporary fiction. I also thought the book’s ending chapter somewhat anticlimactic; the final scenes depict the first time Cathy is able to make reasonably informed decisions in her own interest, and seeing convictions from her younger years overturned is a victory in itself, but I found the ease with which she makes those choices and the apparent lack of conflict in following them through rather bizarre. Rob just flounces off to Canada for no particular reason, and then he comes back and goes off to the war and we never find out what happened to him?

An established and creatively realised plot and characters who seem to step forth from the page, it also has the best sex scene I've ever read in any book (and I've read a lot of both books and sex scenes! For whatever reason, I have some kind of secret (not to secret now) fascination for literary brother/sister incest stories. No one talks about their mother, who has abandoned them to live in the south of France – she was a bit wild, with crazy Irish hair that poor young Cathy seems to have inherited. Our protagonist’s attempts to make sense of her life and understand her feelings of abandonment are filled with shame, guilt, and self-deprecation. It is testament to the strength of Dunmore’s writing that she delivers truths about love and loss through the vehicle of such ingrained taboo.Even the protagonist, Catherine, whose perspective we follow from start to finish, feels detached from her own narrative. Cathy, knowing she will not find her way back home on her own, frightens her with ghost stories, then abandons her. 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. The story is told from the point of view of Catherine who grows up in a country estate with her brother Rob and their grandfather.

It's a bit of a demanding read--Dunmore leaps across time and space, her narrative mirroring the way people think, but as a result, you are immersed completely. This tale of a brother and sister in the English countryside is gorgeous, uncomfortable, lyrical, sad and hopeful.

Catherine and her brother Rob do not understand why they have been abandoned by both their parents, or know where their mother has gone. Their father's health declined after this and he was eventually committed to a sanatorium where he died. There’s a lazy quality here, something difficult to describe, but something which is nonetheless compelling and confusing all at once. I felt like I was being a little picky lowering my rating for that shift at the end (especially since I wasn’t the first one to get there and KNEW it was coming). On one hand I liked the way the novel is insightful: Catherine’s state of mind when she finds out that the world is changing, the minute descriptions of all the characters and the little twists and turns in the narrative.