Books

An eerie, modern gothic thriller about what awaits us after death – angels or the devil . . . A fast-paced, dark, sinister and powerful novel, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal 2011 and longlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2010.

It’s summer. Taken from the buzz of London, her friends and what she thinks is the start of a promising romance, Rebecca is an unwilling visitor to Winterfold.

Ferelith already lives in Winterfold – it’s a place that doesn’t like to let you go, and she knows it inside out: the beach, the crumbling cliff paths, the village streets, the woods, the deserted churches and ruined graveyards, year by year being swallowed by the sea.

Against their better judgement, Rebecca and Ferelith become friends, and during that long, hot, claustrophobic summer they discover more about each other – and about Winterfold – than either could have wanted. Frightening secrets are uncovered that would have been best long forgotten.

Interwoven with Rebecca and Ferelith’s stories is that of the seventeenth century Rector and Dr Barrieux, master of Winterfold Hall, whose bizarre and bloody experiments into the after-life might make angels weep, and the devil crow . . .