OK well it is 10.30 am on Sunday morning and I have just surfaced. Awoke at 6 am, grabbed a cup of tea and back to bed from whence I have not stirred until the final page of this book was reached. I then closed it up absolutely bereft that I had come to the end. It is one of those simply wonderful, fantastic books that take you over and plunge you into a world so fascinating that when you have finished you wonder where you are.
Fellow bloggers who know me well will remember that last year I read Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke, and for a week was up till 1 am every night reading this book as I could not bear to put it down. It totally took me over, as has this one. Sadly, it is not so long as Jonathan Strange et al which, let's face it, is of door step size, but it has had the same impact.
I am not going to give away the story or plot spoilers, except that it features an isolated house on the moors, twins and abandoned children, but suffice it to say that Diane Setterfield is a woman after my own heart. Her passions and influences are those that I adore: Jane Eyre, Woman in White, Rebecca (one of the main characters is Vida Winter-not dissimilar to Mrs De Winter), Henry James (think Turn of the Screw) and, in the descriptions of the garden and one of the characters, John Digance, The Secret Garden. The general decay of the house, Angelfield, and the behaviour of its inmates reminds the reader of Wuthering Heights. I could go on and on. It appears that the author lives in Yorkshire and if her house is not an old stone one set in the middle of a deserted moor, I will be most surprised.
A simply stunning, terrific, entertaining rattling good yarn. It is going to be HUGE.
