Wakenhyrst

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She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past. Like Alice, Maman had never been allowed to do anything; she’d always had things done to her. She had been ‘given in marriage’ and ‘permitted’ fine clothes – although only if Father approved of them. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past. We meet Maud as a child in the repressive isolation and secrecy of Wake’s End as she grapples with the loss of her mother and struggles under her father’s commanding presence. Maud is isolated in more than just location; as the oldest of her much younger siblings, she is alone in her daily life, alone in grieving her mother, alone in her understanding of life at Wake’s End and the desire to be out from under her father’s rule. As her father’s only daughter, she is also isolated as the only female member of her family left—unimportant, incapable, and harmless as any other woman in her father’s eyes. We move through periods of Maud’s childhood as she grows into her teenage years, as she carves space for herself within Wake’s End. She grows to realize that she can grant herself little freedoms, that her own beliefs may lie somewhere outside of what everyone else in Wakenhyrst believes, that perhaps the only thing worth believing in is the one thing she holds most dearly: the fen. There’s a richness to this story that is enhanced by its unhurried pace, by the fact that readers get to sit still within Wake’s End as threads of intrigue, mystery, and building suspense are woven steadily around us as we come to know Maud, her father, and Wakenhyrst itself throughout years of her life. Marianne has a dark history and a secret that she and her ex-boyfriend, Jesse, have kept for years. Now the pact they made is beginning to break, threatening her family and vulnerable daughter.

Wakenhyrst - Goodreads Books similar to Wakenhyrst - Goodreads

Every so often I come across a novel that touches the very core of my being with its beauty. Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver is one such book. I fear anything I write will not do this otherworldly novel justice, but I shall try. In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father.Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. A gripping ghost story… This is a brilliantly atmospheric read (be warned: it’s also terrifying!) with a brave, forward-thinking heroine I loved.” The book fo Alice Pyett is basd on the Book of Margery Kempe. Like Alice, Margery Kempe was married in her teens, had an unconscionable number of children and ended up longing for chastity. Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising.

WAKENHYRST - Kindig WAKENHYRST - Kindig

Starting with her 2010 novel, Dark Matter, and continuing with 2016’s Thin Air, Paver has been writing ghost stories distinguished by their vividly evoked settings and the struggles of their protago­nists. Wakenhyrst is a more-than-worthy addition to their ranks.” The journals of painter and historian Edmund Stearne have been kept safely in Wake’s End since his admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane. He admitted he did it but that he never did anything wrong. 60 years later, his daughter releases his, and her, story to the world. To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry. Wakenhyrst combines elements of all the things I adore, medieval history and religious imagery, the Anglo-Saxon language, the unromantic beauty of the East-Anglian marshes, gothic themes, visceral horror, and the astute exploration of gender and class issues in Edwardian Britain.

Few authors write as well as Michelle Paver so clearly does. Her descriptions of The Fens breathe a unique beauty into the stagnant and miasmic nature of marshlands, her passionate yet restrained depiction of a strange young girl’s first kiss will leave you enraptured, and her mastery of suspense will make your hair stand on end. Wakenhyrst is a framed narrative set in Edwardian Suffolk, at the Sterne family’s ancestral marshland home of Wakes End. The story follows the life of Maud Sterne and her account of the mysterious events leading up to a gruesome murder committed by her father. We see Maud mature into adulthood while simultaneously watching her father, Edmund, descend into madness. An unforgettable, surrealist gothic folk-thriller with commercial crossover appeal from a brilliant new voice. In an additional similarity to Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the element of the supernatural in Wakenhyrst is never made explicit – instead only making an appearance in the character’s dreams and visions. This appears to serve multiple functions, largely to make obvious Edmund Stearne’s poor grasp on reality, to illuminate the ludicrous religious and superstitious phenomena experienced by the inhabitants of Wakenhyrst, but also so as not to undermine the stark, natural power of The Fens.