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

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The Siege has been translated into Russian by Tatyana Averchina, and extracts have been broadcast on radio in St Petersburg. Secrets can cross from one person to the other without words, and suddenly you find that you've always known them. And then Cathy finally meets up with her mother again, but we never find out why the mother left in the first place?

Catherine and her brother Rob do not understand why they have been abandoned by both their parents, or know where their mother has gone. She doesn't rationalize or explain away her characters' actions, but simply presents them without judgment, and while the characters may be difficult to like, they are certainly never dull. All told, I would say this is an excellent choice of literature if you’re looking for something dark and bleak that examines a childhood without parental guidance and affection, forbidden love, familial obligations, and a life of seclusion. Their mother abandons the family home when they are children and their father dies, leaving them to grow up in a decaying mansion cut off from the rest of the world.Mostly the children run wild in the woods and there is a sense of nature, both bounteous and grisly in Dunmore’s atmospheric setting where images of violence against small animals recur.

Alone in their grandfather's decaying country house, they roam the wild grounds freely with minds attuned to the rural wilderness. A Spell of Winter is a difficult book to categorize and difficult to explain without giving too much away - but it follows siblings Cathy and Rob who have spent their lives in a quasi-abandoned manor in the English countryside which belonged to their parents; their father is now dead and their mother ran off when they were young.Whilst the book retains its sumptuous edge, the coming of the war redresses the characters’ focus and priorities.

Though the house has a dominating presence, many of the book’s key moments – instances of sex, violence, conflict, and death – all take place in the surrounding wildlands. Concealed inside a rough hideout of snow and branches she and her brother first cross the line into a physical relationship. Cathy leads her governess, the monstrous Miss Gallagher, deep into the woods and frightens her to death with talk of ghosts.There were parts earlier in the book when I felt that it was really too long, and the incest and abortion in the middle was squicky, and also quite an odd reading experience given that I'd inadvertently bagged two reads in a month featuring sibling incest - what? Although I do like good writing, it does cross that fine line into being overwrought – sometimes the melodrama is amped up and other times it goes into overload. But the sexual frankness belongs to a much later period still, and there is also a modern sensibility in the heroine's path to self-realization, not through others but on her own terms.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. Dunmore's writing is put to more meaningful purpose in many of her other books: this one almost seems to suffocate under its own entrancing and perfumed lyricism. They are stories in which things are so odd and sort of awful, but you get pulled in and start to feel the weight of the events surrounding the most normal of things, like the eating of a piece of cheese. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession. A wonderfully written saga of love and decline both in the class system and amongst a pair of siblings.