Michelle Paver appends an extensive Author's Note to her excellent new novel Wakenhyrst; in it she describes the book's genesis - the chance finds and happenings which sparked ideas which in turn formed the basis of her tale. A novel is more than just a clever assemblage of components, of course, and it's in the way she has used her raw material that Michelle Paver's skill is evident, for while her research has been extensive and comprehensive, she has made her facts work, both efficiently and elegantly, for their place in her intricate story.
From disparate sources come an inspired conjunction: a lonely house in the eerie and forbidding Suffolk fens, a medieval 'Doom'* discovered by chance, a historian writing a monograph on a fourteenth century mystic, his bright young daughter, overlooked because of her sex. Add to that a dreadful act never admitted or atoned for, a liberal dash of local folklore and a touch of the supernatural, and you have a gothic thriller about obsession, set in the Edwardian era and the 1960s, which should grip you until the final page.
If you've read Dark Matter or Thin Air you'll know how good a Michelle Paver book is; her latest doesn't disappoint.
*Based on this one, which I happened to see when in the area a couple of years ago.
