A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

A Spell of Winter
Helen Dunmore

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Published: 1995

Winner of the 1996 Women's Prize for Fiction

Cathy and her brother, Rob, don’t know why they have been abandoned by their parents. Alone in their grandfather’s decaying country house, they roam the wild grounds freely with minds attuned to the rural wilderness. Lost in their own private world, they seek and find new lines to cross.

But as the First World War draws closer, crimes both big and small threaten the delicate refuge they have built. Cathy will do anything to protect their dark Eden from anyone, or anything, that threatens to destroy it.

“You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop, there may as well never have been any life at all. A house dies as quickly as a body.”

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore

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