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

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Although I was expecting more plot, and more revelation, this is more a study of sadness or an exploration of family. Also important to note: the plot will not answer all of the questions you will inevitably ask yourself as the story unfolds. I wanted us to wake to a kingdom of ice where our breath would turn to icicles as it left our lips, and we would walk through tunnels of snow to the outhouses and find birds fallen dead from the air. The atmosphere and setting reminded me of a couple of my favourite William Trevor novels ( Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault - they share the decaying country house settings and the Anglo-Irish family settings, and they share the elegiac tone with darker overtones and the quality of the writing.

Even the protagonist, Catherine, whose perspective we follow from start to finish, feels detached from her own narrative.I read this book knowing little of the the plot, and I encourage others to avoid summaries of the novel that reveal far too much. The characters are distinctly peripheral; each one demonstrates a hazy carelessness, drifting along in a fog of apathy. For whatever reason, I have some kind of secret (not to secret now) fascination for literary brother/sister incest stories. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t understand the characters or their relationship with one another. Dunmore's writing is the star of the show here: gorgeously lyrical, evocative and atmospheric, alive with startling imagery and unexpected conjunctions.

We see events through the eyes of Cathy - a young girl who so resembles her mother that her grandfather can hardly bear to look at her, while their governess, the boy hating Miss Gallagher, harbours an obsessive and unhealthy love for her. I'm predisposed to love half a dozen tropes in A Spell of Winter, but to my surprise the book did nothing for me. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary Gothic set in turn-of-the-century England . I am reviewing this after Goodreads recommend I read it - just shows how spot on they are at assessing your reading tastes because I think you will see from this review, I loved this one. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.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? There is a war mentioned in this book and while they don't actually name the war at all, I'm guessing it may be world war one? Some events in the plot were gripping and shocking but the parts in-between were quite slow and boring. It is is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for 880 days from the fall of Mga on 30th August 1941.

And then Cathy finally meets up with her mother again, but we never find out why the mother left in the first place?Their father is housed in an asylum and their mother is a figure of local scandal who lives in France. I have mixed feelings about this book as some parts I absolutely loved and others I found very dull. What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels. I appreciate ambiguity that can go one way or another, but too many possibilities leaves a story feeling unfinished, imo.

I found it dreary and the characters worthy of a good slap and a "What the heck are you thinking/doing! Dunmore’s writing is both flowing and haunting, easy to read but also determined to crawl under the reader’s skin. She published twelve novels including Zennor in Darkness , which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the inaugural Orange Prize in 1996; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby and House of Orphans. This novel was the first to win the Orange Prize in 1996, a prize that has had a few reincarnations, including the Baileys Prize and now simply The Women’s Prize for Fiction.

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. Reading this book made me feel the way I felt when I watched The Piano or Angels and Insects, or read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. The siblings are left to their own devices with only an unlikeable governess, and a single servant to see to their needs. Attempts by Dunmore to make Cathy a "modern update" of Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw turns A Spell of Winter into "a string of salacious, increasingly overwritten adventures straight out of the pulp-fiction files". A Spell of Winter is set during the early years of the twentieth century, during the period before, during and immediately after the First World War.