After the untimely (and mysterious )death of her husband,Elsie is sent to her husband's ramshackle country manor.The manor is surrounded by a bleak scenery,an hostile village and a decrepit church. That should be enough to make one feel a bit tense but as this is a ghost story, of course,there is more:a 17th century diary,strange wooden figures and many,many secrets. This is in every sense a classic ghost story(haunted house,forbidden rooms,noises in the night...)but what makes this special is the fact that the ghostly part is very good,but there is an excellent mystery story underneath.

Ill be honest, I only picked this book up after seeing the stunning cover. I had no idea what it was about, who wrote it, or what to expect. So I went into this one blind. And it blew me away.

It's so sincerely dark and creepy. Genuinely, it had me lowering the kindle at night in bed and checking the corner of the room every few minutes, more often than i do with a Stephen King book. From first page to last, the book maintains a really dark, Gothic, sinister feel. It brilliantly weaves together 3 interlinked stories, 200 years apart, in both the first and third person. I was kept guessing at every page, never quite sure what was actually going on, but never really caring. I was just pulled along at a breakneck pace, page after gripping page, until i finally put it down, seriously creeped out and just a little jumpy.

Its a fantastic book, beautifully written by an author I know ill be keeping an eye out for in the future.

When a young widow travels to her dead husband’s family home, after only a few months of marriage, she believes that her greatest challenge will be in mastering her grief. But The Bridge is an unsettling place: a rambling old house, unloved and worn, with a meagre staff of taciturn servants and a history of unpleasant accidents. This is a Gothic tale of a slow, creeping kind, best savoured on a dark winter’s night beside the fire, in which supernatural events sit side by side with very real social tension.


Elsie is always conscious of her background. Before marrying her husband, Rupert, she worked with her brother Jolyon in the family’s match factory, and she imagines that the servants at The Bridge must be expecting better. However, when she arrives at the house, she finds only a handful of half-trained maids and a housekeeper who clearly knows more about The Bridge’s history than she cares to share. Elsie must settle into her role as mistress of a grand (if ramshackle) establishment, and get used to the presence of her husband’s cousin Sarah, a well-meaning but lacklustre companion. But there is something about the house that unsettles her. Strange sawing noises come from the garret late at night, and drifts of sawdust appear on the floor; but the garret door is stuck. When Elsie and Sarah finally manage to force it open, they make a startling discovery: once which will shed new light on the family’s history, and bring a long-forgotten evil back into their lives.

Purcell keeps the pace of the novel just right, allowing the foreboding to bubble up between the lines and playing on the fundamental creepiness of the ‘silent companions’ of the title. If you’ve visited an English stately home, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen one of these wooden cutouts – I remember there being one or two at Dyrham Park, where I used to go as a little girl. Funnily enough I wasn’t really disturbed by them before, but things might be a little different now. Elsie’s story sits alongside two other plots: the tale of a burned, mute woman being treated in an asylum; and the diary of a woman from the mid-17th century. I won’t say any more to avoid giving spoilers, but all three tales weave together very neatly, full of familiar horror motifs: the silent, calculating child; the unsettling nursery; and the vast, dark, ancient house. And Purcell is particularly good at gradually revealing her characters too us, inching out the information so that events take on different perspectives at different times. What do we actually know and who should we believe?

I should add that I don’t read horror, because I’m a wimp and am easily scared, and so hard-core horror readers might find this a bit quaint and ineffective for their tastes. But for the rest of us it’s a subtle, uneasy story set in that perfect moment at the end of the 19th century when tradition is morphing into innovation, when the railway and the factory sit side by side with the landed gentry, when folk belief lingers alongside scientific rationalism… It’s a good, solid read with a clever conclusion, and perfect for those who like a bit of ghostliness to spice up their TBR pile.

This review will go live on my blog on 1 October 2017.

When her husband dies unexpectedly, his young pregnant widow is sent to his decaying country estate to see out her pregnancy. Isolated with no real friends, apart from a companion in the form of her husbands spinster cousin, Elsie finds herself experiencing disturbing visions and is haunted by the history of the house in which she stays. Add to this a creepy wooden figure (created by the Dutch and known as Silent Companions) found in a locked room who appears to have a life of it's own and you have a classic gothic tale full of history, secrets and unexplained happenings.

This novel has all the elements of that classic gothic read, with is dual narrative it can be slightly jarring, at first I was slightly confused as to what was happening but got used to the abrupt changes. With a cover which just says buy me, I would imagine this will be very popular.

A Stephen King-esque premise mashed up with a traditional historical ghost story, I was enthralled by this book despite being so severely creeped-out that I had to abandon reading it in bed and settle for a train journey in daylight instead. And the ending... GASP! I love a good ghost story, and this one did not disappoint. Will be recommending it to all my scare-loving friends.

Following the sudden death of her husband, pregnant Elsie heads off to the depths of the country. The old family estate has been long overlooked being barely kept going by a skeleton staff. Accompanied by her husband's rather odd cousin Elsie sees months stretching ahead of her in the gloomy, lonely house waiting for her child to be born. However, the strange noises in the loft lead to the discovery of of wooden "companions", painted to look like real people, and a diary from the sixteenth century.

This is quite a complex book with different threads running in parallel in different historical time periods - Elsie's story, the sixteenth century and Elsie afterwards in an asylum. I am usually very happy to read books of this nature and find I enjoy the comparisons between the threads. Unfortunately this book made no effort to warn the reader of switches between threads. I could be reading the story of Elsie waiting for her baby and then suddenly find myself thrown back into the sixteenth century on the next line with no textual gap or sub heading. As all the threads had similarities it could be a paragraph before I clicked the change had been made resulting in me having to go back and re-read the text from a different point of view. This did rather spoil the atmosphere and continuity of the book.

I very much enjoyed the book with the exception of the issue mentioned above. The characters were very three dimensional and evolved as the book progressed. The shy and odd cousin began to be more outgoing and the little girl Hetta in the sixteenth century gradually came into her own as the story moved on. The main character Elsie also developed as we learned a little about her past. Was she all she seemed to be?

The plot of the book was well constructed in all of the threads. There were several twists and turns not all of which I anticipated which added to my enjoyment. This book was a little different from the run of the mill and the cross between a ghost story and a historical thriller. I would certainly be happy to read further books by this author.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

3.5 stars for this deliciously creepy tale.

Laura Purcell has written an entertainingly dark novel, set in Victorian and Caroline (that is, during the reign of Charles I) England, of grief, insane asylums, witchcraft, and the uncanny. Elsie Bainbridge is a pregnant widow who initially struck me as cold, self-absorbed and fairly unlikeable but I warmed to her as the novel progressed. Other main characters include her beloved younger brother Jolyon and her cousin through marriage, Sarah; seventeenth century characters include Anne and Josiah Bainbridge and their daughter Hetta. The story does not exactly hang together flawlessly but it is such a Gothic delight that I found I did not care.

Comparisons to Susan Hill are deserved. And if you liked Dr Who's weeping angels, you will love this novel!

I received this ebook free from NetGalley and Bloomsbury.

The Silent Companions is a tense gothic novel set in the nineteenth-century, centred around a dilapidated old house and the newly widowed woman who goes to live there. Elsie’s short marriage is quickly ended by her husband’s death at the country seat he was trying to make hospitable for her, but when she moves there herself to see through her pregnancy, there is more for her to worry about than the hostile neighbours and inexperienced servants. Between her and her husband’s strange, awkward cousin Sarah, they discover the diaries of a woman who lived in the house in the seventeenth-century—a diary full of death and despair—and a strange wooden figure, a silent companion. This companion is not the only one, however, and they might be silent, but their influence scares Elsie to an ever-increasing extent.

The novel is written with different threads of narrative, with Elsie trying to recall her story in an asylum, her third person narration of the events she lived, and excerpts from the earlier diary. Through this, Purcell weaves mystery and darkness, leaving the reader wanting more with each narrative jump. There are plenty of classic gothic tropes to enjoy, with spirits, mysterious doors, noises at night, and unsettling family secrets on all sides. At times the story is genuinely unsettling, both in terms of fear and in the claustrophobic atmosphere.

The presentation of Elsie—a heroine with a tormented past and a present in which men seem to be threatening her freedom—is clever, combining sympathy with an uncertainty for what she could be potentially forgetting or misremembering. The position of women in Victorian society, particularly in relation to class, is near the forefront of the novel though not explicitly discussed, and the gothic heroine is one contained by men against her will. At the same time, the novel is populated by other women who are trapped in a position or have done bad things without realising the consequences, reflecting her plight.

The Silent Companions fits very well into the gothic genre and provides a suitably eerie and unnerving read. In atmosphere, it has similarities to Waters’ Fingersmith as well as older gothic novels, and its use of an additional seventeenth-century narrative both fulfils the trope of an older, inset narrative and gives a different aspect to the novel, showing how women could be seen as witches or as insane and hysterical depending on the century. Purcell’s novel shows that the historical gothic novel is a genre that will continue to live and continue to question female autonomy whilst providing chilling reads.

This is a great book which makes you wonder all the way through what horrible things will happen next. The sense of unease builds through the book with an ending that makes you realise that evil really is pervasive.