Cathy leads her governess, the monstrous Miss Gallagher, deep into the woods and frightens her to death with talk of ghosts. By presenting them and their often deplorable actions without judgement, she asks us to question human boundaries, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions in many instances.

Rob and Catherine live in virtual isolation in the crumbling old house belonging to their grandfather. 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. A Spell of Winter я все поражалась, как такое бывает – такая роскошь, такая избыточность, когда литература может себе позволить что-то промежуточное, просто прекрасно средний роман, в котором все гладко, продуманно, прошито и выписано. The maturity of Catherine, even though she lives in a world with limited experiences, is amazing and is possible because she accepts what is and keeps an even appearance to the outside world. Het is ook een boek over verlies, alle soorten verlies, van ouders, van een schijnbaar onvoorwaardelijke liefde, van een huis, van verwachtingen .

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. I agree that the war changed the tone of the book, and while I don’t think it was completely irrelevant to the story itself, I wish it had been done differently.

Dunmore's writing is the star of the show here: gorgeously lyrical, evocative and atmospheric, alive with startling imagery and unexpected conjunctions. Dunmore’s writing is both flowing and haunting, easy to read but also determined to crawl under the reader’s skin. To some degree, this might be down to no more than a pacing issue, but it led to a lot of confusion on my part of what this book was aiming to do. There’s a lazy quality here, something difficult to describe, but something which is nonetheless compelling and confusing all at once. When Cathy finds herself alone in the mansion, everyone else long gone, nature starts to reclaim it, room by room.The Siege has been translated into Russian by Tatyana Averchina, and extracts have been broadcast on radio in St Petersburg. I know the author is under no obligation to give her readers a happy ending, and I'm not sure how it could have happened in this case, but the story's resolution was just so disappointing and unsatisfying. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences.

My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. This haunting and evocative novel was the first Orange Prize Winner and set a high standard for future hopefuls. If a child was born from those two people, I wonder if it would be born knowing all their secrets, somewhere within it. Immensely sad, quite beautiful , and deserves to be read by all lovers of good novel ― The Bookseller --This text refers to the paperback edition. Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction.It’s nice to think that Dunmore got the prize off to a flying start (just check out the people who have received the award since), especially as the author died a couple of years ago. Largely left to fend for themselves, Cathy's relationship with Rob becomes unhealthily close, with tragic consequences which are played out at length against the historical backdrop of the immediate pre-Great War setting. This was my first Helen Dunmore, which I decided to pick up as it won the inaugural Women's Prize for Fiction back when it was known as the Orange Prize, and the first thing that struck me about it was how enchanting I found her prose.

The siblings are left to their own devices with only an unlikeable governess, and a single servant to see to their needs. Ik vond dit een prachtig boek, over hoe bepaalde gebeurtenissen in een leven onze gedragingen zo kunnen beïnvloeden dat er grenzen overschreden worden, en hoe je daarna alles doet om jezelf te beschermen. For the past two years, I have read a number of the longlisted titles, and look forward to the nominations and awards.There is the same harsh northern landscape, the same tug of forbidden passions, family secrets similarly buried, and the familiar situation of the rich bachelor a distant figure on the neighboring estate. Some readers may find the book's "intensity and darkness", which hovers between "gripping and overwrought", a little "heavy-handed", but the reviewer was impressed by Dunmore's "keen, close writing" and "artful use of metaphor".