A Spell of Winter
  • Published: 16 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241987506
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

A Spell of Winter

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Formats & editions
EBook
30 Jan 2008
Paperback
16 Oct 2019
Paperback
20 Aug 2019
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Helen Dunmore's haunting Orange Prize-winning novel with a stunning new package for autumn

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.
  • Published: 16 October 2019
  • ISBN: 9780241987506
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore was an award-winning novelist, children’s author and poet who will be remembered for the depth and breadth of her fiction. Rich and intricate, yet narrated with a deceptive simplicity that made all of her work accessible and heartfelt, her writing stood out for the fluidity and lyricism of her prose, and her extraordinary ability to capture the presence of the past.

Her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, explored the events which led D. H. Lawrence to be expelled from Cornwall on suspicion of spying, and won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize. Published in 2010, her eleventh novel, The Betrayal, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Lie in 2014 was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2015 RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Her final novel, Birdcage Walk, deals with legacy and recognition – what writers, especially women writers, can expect to leave behind them – and was described by the Observer as ‘the finest novel Helen Dunmore has written’. She died in June 2017, and in January 2018, she was posthumously awarded the Costa Prize for her volume of poetry, Inside the Wave.

portrait photo of Helen Dunmore

Also by Helen Dunmore

Girl, Balancing
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories
Birdcage Walk
Exposure
Love of Fat Men
The Lie
The Land Lubbers Lying Down Below
See all

Praise for A Spell of Winter

A marvellous novel about forbidden passions and the terrible consequences of thwarted love. Dunmore is one of the finest English writers

Daily Mail

A hugely involving story which often stops you in your tracks with the beauty of its writing

Observer

An electrifying and original talent, a writer whose style is characterized by a lyrical, dreamy intensity

Guardian

Tense, dark and intensely gripping . . . written so seductively that passages sing out from the page

Sunday Times

Her prose is poetic in its emotional range and intensity

TLS

Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary Gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. In true Gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. . . . A finely crafted, if disturbing, literary page-turner

Publishers Weekly

It bears the distinctive lyrical beauty of its predecessors . . . Helen Dunmore is an unusually fine writer. There is a strong and sensuous magic to A Spell of Winter

Gill Hornby in The Times

One of our finest writers

Philip Pullman

Immensely sad, quite beautiful, and deserves to be read by all lovers of good novel

The Bookseller
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