It's been a while since I visited this genre of book but as soon as I started reading I slipped back into my comfort zone easily and the words really did start reading themselves to me as I got fully immersed in the time and setting.
We first hear of the most heinous crime committed by Edmund Stearn and his subsequent incarceration in an asylum. It appears that there are others whose interest in piqued in the crime and the myth that surrounds the whys and wherefores. Especially the part played by Stearn's daughter Maud. We then delve into the past and, through Maud's eyes, assisted by her reading of her father's diary, start to get a better picture of the time leading up to that fateful day; the day that Stearn finally cracked. We see that there is much more than appeared on face value. How the discovery of the Doom impacted on his life. A life that was already obsessed with witchcraft and daemons. All coming together in this spooky Gothic tale which meanders through past and present, throwing up shocking revelation at very turn.
I do love a book that I can actually "see". I am not a very visual reader but here, the wonderful descriptions of the Fens had me actually watching the action as it played out in my head whilst I was reading. It's almost to be considered a character in its own right, so integral it was to the tale being told. This seeing also made the book even darker for me than usual with this genre. At times it was downright scary and I am glad I read it during the daylight hours!
The story itself was intriguing and kept my attention throughout as I was desperate to find out what happened. Well, OK, we know what happens, I really mean the whys and wherefores and the absolute, as it turns out shocking, truth of it all. Especially with the explanation of why Maud's life post-incident turned out as it did.
All in all, a crackingly good read that gripped me throughout and left me satisfied at the end. I'm off to check out the author's back catalogue for more of the same. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

From the start I found this book really intriguing, it is not something I would usually choose but I found the whole concept of the book really gripping and wanted to get through to find out the answers to some of the mysteries which it refers to. I found it very atmospheric and the descriptions of the setting of the book in the fens of Suffolk were very engaging. I was also watching The Haunting of Hill House on TV at the same time as reading this and the two witch and ghost themed things complimented each other! It was a book that got into my head and I would be thinking about it when I wasn’t reading it and looking forward to the time I could sit down and read more.

Stylistically, this is something of a departure from Paver's previous adult horror fiction - more Gothic, more lurid, less reserved. For the most part I think this experiment is a success. There are some very arresting images and passages (eels are fundamentally horrific!), and if the book's thematic ambitions sometimes threaten to overbalance it then there's at least a surfeit of interesting, vivid material from medieval conceptions of hell to psychoanalytic ideas of madness to musings on women's freedom and subjectivity.. As ever with Paver, she wears her considerable research lightly and produces detailed, sensitive descriptions of the natural world that ground the more garish elements. Recommended for strong-ish constitutions!

1966. The late Edmund Stearne,a gentleman and a murderer,creates a bit of a stir in the modern art world with his triptych that he painted while being a guest at Broadmoor,a high security psychiatric hospital. Because,yes, Edmund was a murderer. Right?
1906. Maude lives with her family in Wake's End,a rather grim, isolated manor surrounded by marshes and fens. Her father, Edmund Stearne,a egocentric, inspired historian with a predilection for medieval history has more than a tight grip on his household and after the death of her mother life becomes just a bit more unsettling for 15 year old Maude. She discovers her father's diary and so secretly follows his musings and thoughts. When Edmund discovers the Doom,a painting that represent the Last Day of Judgement,in the churchyard things start to break down for him. Present and past demons haunt Edmund and very slowly he becomes a more than tormented and haunted man. The outcome is both tragic and horrific...
This is both a gothic story,a crime story and the story of the downfall of a human being. The bleak and haunting fens are a perfect background for this very atmospheric and mesmerizing story.

I am a fan already of Michelle Paver, I love her atmospheric ghost stories set in isolated wildernesses. I was wondering how this story would pan out and whether there'd be as much magic as in her previous books with perhaps more mysterious settings and spectral happenings. I was not disappointed one bit.

The Fens here are utterly alive with their wild and untamed nature, the stark beauty of them, the moonlit reeds and the eels. I adored Maud, and was completely behind her from the opening of the novel where we hear of the strange and unexplored murder that occurred in the house. This is delightfully gothic, I fell into the storytelling which was both tinged with terror and full of the warmth that I felt for her character.

I would highly recommend!

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Firstly thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for my ARC of this book. Having read Pavers other work, I was very much looking forward to this one.

As with Pavers other work the location is a character in itself. The Fens are perfectly described and she evokes the terrible and dangerous yet beautiful and bewitching atmosphere of this place.

I found the main character of Maud impressive in how she finds her strength in adversity. The demeaning and belittling lives of Female Edwardian women is realised across the various classes and roles they had. The patriarchy and all their contradictory beliefs and menacing manipulation is also shared across the classes.

My problem is how the book has been presented. The real horror is in how women are abused in these times. It felt more like a good Edwardian story of madness and manipulation as opposed to a ‘gothic ghost story’ Although there are elements of a haunting and the various POVs bring this along. It just didn’t have enough fast paced horror, or perhaps the frightening elements where too far apart.

All in all a well written dark and atmospheric story by a great author, just not what I was hoping for. Perhaps it was just too long and would have packed a better punch in a shorter story like Pavers other works.

A mystery, a ghost story, a thriller, religion, history and more.
This book has so much to give and its themes are plenty.
It is a story of mystery and intrigue.
It was an easy read and very enjoyable.
The story tells the life of a girl and her father (whom is plagued by demons).

I know Michelle Paver’s name from the excellent children’s series based in the stone age. My son loved them. However, I have not previously read any of her adult books.

It is just after the turn of the twentieth century and we are in the fenland of rural Norfolk. Maud Stern is growing up in a remote house – not just geographically but also as far as human attention is concerned. Her Mother is frequently mysteriously unwell and her Father, Edmund Stearn, is very victorian in his attitudes to his children – particularly Maud. Maud is a troubled child and grows into a strange adult. Edmund Stearn is obsessively fixated on the life of a fifteenth century woman – witch or saint?

I very much enjoyed the opening chapters of this book. I found it fascinating. Poor Maud is very troubled and no one explains things to her. Consequently she comes up with her own explanations based around local superstitions. She grows into a strange woman who was difficult to like. Prickly and eccentric are words which spring to mind. The character of her father, Edmund, is also interesting but difficult to like. His attitude to women is extreme even for this period in history and he really is a tyrant. The cast also includes various servants, a Doctor, a minister, the minister’s spinster daughter and assorted strange characters. To be honest this is a cast of people who were very much of their time and not very palatable in today’s society. Had poor Maud been shown a modicum of positive interest during her childhood she would have been an altogether different person.

I felt the book stalled about half way through and seemed to mark time for a while. There is a lot of atmosphere particularly in relation to the fens, their smell and the damp. This plays a significant role in the demise into madness of Edmund but I found that it got rather repetitive and tedious. The book, however, did pick up again in the last quarter and took on more of a pace. It was worth ploughing through this stagnant section. The ending was interesting and I am not sure that it answered all my questions. However, I am sure that the author intended it that way.

I enjoyed this book despite it being a book of quite perpetual gloom and unpleasant characters. The writing was good and the plot flowed reasonably well with the exception of the middle section. The description was excellent – I could see, breathe and smell the fens though I didn’t need this stressed quite so often. I would certainly be interested in reading more books by this author.

I received a free copy of this book via Netgalley.

A multi-layered Gothic mystery told with verve and style

Grips you from the first page. Atmospheric with a real sense of time and place. Full of local characters vividly portrayed, with local dialect, old customs and herbal cures.

The plot centres around a vicious murder committed in 1913 by Edmund Stearne, patriarch of Wake's End, a huge old house in the village of Wakenhyrst on the edge of the fens. Did he really do it? Why did he later become famous as the mad artist of three doom-laden pictures full of medieval devils? The answer lies in a twisted tale of superstition, a mystic, medieval religion and madness.

The characters and setting are classic Victorian Gothic, though the story is set mainly in the early 20th century. Stearne is a cold man, caring more for his research than his family. Maud's beloved Maman is the wife he married for money, worn down by constant pregnancies. Maud is their repressed and inquisitive daughter who falls for the gardener. Then there are the villagers with their country lore. St Guthlaf's church is also important, its dark secret's revelation integral to the plot. This could be a stilted story, full of cardboard characters but in Paver's hands it really comes alive. The characters are interesting and believable, the folklore and contemporary medical practice well-researched with elements of the story based on true events.

The main focus is Maud. She is a young girl when most of the action takes place but is also seen as an old woman in the 1960s, selling her story to save her home. This split time-frame highlights the strong contrast between repression of women in Edwardian times and Women's Lib of the 1960s, when a journalist writes a defamatory article about Stearne's crime.

Maud's childhood is an unhappy one. As a child we see her trying vainly to please her selfish, domineering father but as she starts to grow up, smouldering resentment replaces any wish to placate him. Her mother, weighed down by an unhappy marriage, loves Maud but is unable to protect her. Her father is researching an ancient manuscript by Alice Pyett, a mystic visionary, something that he thinks will make his name. He is oblivious to the fact that a much more important subject, the story of The Doom, lies within their medieval churchyard, a place he grows to dread. He also keeps a very private notebook!

The story develops at a fast pace, making you want to read on, though some of the medieval mysticism was a bit tortuous, which is why I gave it four starts rather than five. For fans of The Essex Serpent or anyone who enjoys a good historical mystery. An enthralling read.

I enjoyed reading this book and liked the way that the story developed. Definitely recommended to those who enjoy this genre.

After loving Paver's Dark Matter and Thin Air, this book didn't work so well for me. The two earlier books were tight and ambiguous, and because we only saw the story through one set of eyes we were left hovering deliciously on that edge between haunting or a form of madness. Plus they were shivering-scary.

This feels more laboured, with a constant switching between narratives: Paver's strengths show in Edmund Stearne's diary - the gradual revelations, the disintegrating mind. But alternating this with a 3rd person narrative through the PoV of his eminently sane, though enraged, daughter Maud removes any sense of ambiguity.

A bit MR James (the painting), a bit Wuthering Heights-lite, this ties all its ends up too neatly for my taste. Modern Gothic fans may well love it.

Wakenhyrst is a perfect Gothic horror novel. It has all the elements a reader could wish for. I love how much of the book comes from real life sources and I'm inspired to dig deeper for myself. The setting is evocative and it is a tribute to Paver's skill that the fen is both comforting and safe, and horridly creepy at the same time. The characters all so alive it feels like they are creeping from the page. It felt more like I was living this story than reading it. Beautiful.

You'd expect Maud, here, in 1906, to be quite worldly-wise, especially considering the rapidity with which her father knocks up her mother, to such often and such calamitous ends. But no, living in such a freakishly antiquated manner on the edge of a fen, it comes down to other people to teach her in the ways of all things. There's the solitary man living alone in the fen, a place much afeared by everyone else for its dangers and mystical beings, there's an older girl servant with a sharp knowledge of mankind, and a handsome young lad also working the estate. So which is it – the over-bearing father, the other educators, or the fenland's rampant superstitions – that will most inspire what will happen fifty years later, when her father does some impromptu brain surgery on someone in the garden with an ice-pick, leaving a legacy of her allegedly going mad and three incredibly famous but hard to describe paintings? Is she right to have kept a notebook that could have let her father off as innocent (or mad) from public eye from decades, and is an interested author right to say she was in fact the murderess, and witchcraft was involved?

File this as a Gothic chiller, and a Gothic chiller of the higher order. It has everything – rarefied setting, unusual if not disturbing characters and situations, and secrets lasting the years. At times I felt the author made those secrets a little too bluntly guessable – we could tell what had been what without any build-up of clues as if she hadn't had control of the drip-drip of information, but never did I really get ahead of things to any major extent. And in fact, it's quite lovely to read the final third and come across the returning detail, with the "oh, so that was a clue…" grin on your face.

It's a Gothic chiller to the extent that it has all the hallmarks of that elderly genre, but there's enough here that's modern. Maud is a great way in for the author to discuss sexual politics, and in particular the religiously-inspired suppression of women. There was a point when a chap has a vision of the word "wake" and I wouldn't have been surprised at times to have seen the horrific neologism "woke" instead. But this never turns into an issue-based story, it remains one of sheer readable delight. It's a clever read, where so much richness ultimately conspires to make one of the more thoughtful and intelligent entertainments the genre has.

I requested this because I enjoyed Dark Matter so much and once again I've been blown away by this author. I was hooked from the word go and found it very hard to put down. Won't give me nightmares like Dark Matter, but the evocation of the Fens was just as powerful. Highly recommended.

Another excellent supernatural tale from Michelle Paver.

Wakenhyrst focuses on a young girl named Maud who lives in a mansion on the Suffolk fens with her horrid misogynist father Edmund. Edmund is plagued by demons; whether they are mental or literal is open to debate. Maud watches as her father slowly unravels and the family hurtles towards scandal and tragedy.

A thoroughly enjoyable and at times creepy tale, Wakenhyrst successfully pulled me in to its world almost immediately. Maud is an interesting, not always sympathetic, central character, and her father is simply awful!

The only imperfection here for me was in the pacing. I felt there was a little too much of a slow build (Edmund must have suspiciously noticed the soggy fens smell a hundred times) and the climax seemed rushed in comparison.

Highly recommended for fans of supernatural tales with historical settings. Or for people who are interested in efficiently catching eels.

I could not decide whether or not I enjoyed this book - I found it hard to read. On the positive side it was very atmospheric - the descriptions of the fens were beautiful but it felt so dark. I did not take to the main characters and found Edmund’s obsessions difficult to understand. Maud was brave, intelligent and manipulative. I did not like her but was mpressed by her survival. The tension was well ratcheted up and I did not foresee the ending.

Beautifully written but not one my pupils are looking kelp to take to.

I have never read Michelle Paver before but will certainly make it my mission to read others.
I really enjoyed Wakenhyrst. It took me a little while to ‘get into’, but then drew me in and kept me guessing till the very end. I loved Maud’s character and the way she developed. Set in the early 20th Century women were deemed unimportant and Maud was fearful of her father but throughout the story she grew in strength and bravery. A tale which encompasses the supernatural, witchcraft, loneliness, sadness, religion, relationships and madness and keeps you engrossed in the story. Beautifully written, I would definitely recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley for my free copy in exchange for a review

I found myself drawn into this book by degrees. For the first few pages I was rather confused. After that I started to get into the rhythm of the book and found myself gradually reading more and more quickly until I was completely immersed in it. It's a great yarn. It's pacy. The tension builds beautifully, and I like the fact that you as the reader are as unsure as Maud, the main character, as to what is going on. What is the book? Is it a ghost story? Is it a portrait of insanity? Is it a gothic tale? It's a bit of all of these, and I like the fact that the uncertainty lingers to the very end of the book. Having said that it is still a very satisfying read and there is no sense of being cheated of an ending. I loved Maud as a character and her development throughout the book is one of the most pleasing things about it.

An excellent, atmospheric book.
Intriguing storytelling at its best with a supernatural thread running through the core.
Having read both of the authors previously themed books, i can honestly say that it is of the same high caliber.
Highly recommended.

Wow what a wonderful read, this is a book full of gothic atmosphere, mystery and menace set amongst the wild, bleak wilderness of the fens. Steeped in folklore and superstition Maud is totally dominated by her father and brought up in a miserable oppressive way while her father descends into his own paranoia and madness. This is my first book by the very talented Michelle Paver and I was very impressed both by the beautiful writing and the excellent description of the characters and their backgrounds. The novel was a dark compulsive read and I really loved it, it’s a novel to enjoy and savour its original and very reminiscent of the the old style gothic classics and I can highly recommended it.
My thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for giving me the chance to read the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.