However her father is scared of it, his guilt manifesting in his paranoia. Maud loves the fen and feels at home wandering its watery wilderness. To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. Through this it highlights the power imbalance caused by poverty. She saves and befriends a magpie, hence the cover, and she strikes up a friendship with the handsome gardener, someone below her station as far as her father is concerned. As she reads her father’s journal, her opinion of him changes rapidly and she starts to subtly annoy him on purpose. It also means you’re looking forward to something bad happening to him! He might think her weak minded but she’s quite the opposite. In Wakenhyrst, Edmund can have horrible attitudes towards women but it’s tempered by Maud’s perspective. In Thin Air, the main character was racist and arrogant, and despite it fitting for the time, it was a little off-putting. I loved the decision to switch between the despicable man of the times and the girl’s perspective. She had been ‘given in marriage’ and ‘permitted’ fine clothes – although only if Father approved of them. Like Alice, Maman had never been allowed to do anything she’d always had things done to her. Young Maud makes up her own version of events until she starts to read her father’s journals. Edmund’s sexual desires take precedence over his wife’s health, who repeatedly suffers miscarriages. As Maud’s account starts, she knows her mother is constantly ill, resulting in “the groaning”. He can treat those in his household how he pleases, as long as he keeps up appearances to society. Through Edmund’s journal, his entitlement of his position in the world is clear. While the characters are fictional, much of the story is based on real historical accounts the delirious writings of a spiritualist, the disturbing paintings of asylum inmates, and the doom, a religious mural depicting the Day of Judgement. Wakenhyrst is a gothic style horror set in the fens of East Anglia.

The gulf between these two existences was vast. 60 years later, his daughter releases his, and her, story to the world. He admitted he did it but that he never did anything wrong. 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.

Wakenhyrst novel