A Spell of Winter: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

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The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. Whilst the book retains its sumptuous edge, the coming of the war redresses the characters’ focus and priorities. There is the same harsh northern landscape, the same tug of forbidden passions, family secrets similarly buried, and the familiar situation of the rich bachelor a distant figure on the neighboring estate. Cathy and her older brother Rob grow up without their parents on an estate in rural England in the early 20th century.

Immensely sad, quite beautiful , and deserves to be read by all lovers of good novel ― The Bookseller --This text refers to the paperback edition. The children are never told exactly what caused their family to splinter apart so they grow to rely solely on each other in this circumscribed world.Everyone is right to fear for Cathy, as it turn out, and events reach a shocking climax, but with the First World War not far away, it seems everything’s is in a state of flux. The other reason this book came alive for me is that Cathy was such a fascinating, sympathetic, well-developed character, and the depth of emotional complexity that Dunmore was able to excavate with this book was staggering. Dunmore's prose is incredibly rich and detailed which can be beautiful to read but also quite tedious at times when you just want to know what is happening in the plot. I don't think this is the kind of book that people intensely hate - I think it's more of a 'it was fine, nothing special' for a lot of readers.

I also completed two novels; fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel. Her brother is the only one who really understands what her life has been like, and keeps her close. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England.

This tale of a brother and sister in the English countryside is gorgeous, uncomfortable, lyrical, sad and hopeful. But there are too many long descriptions of woodland and flowers (so many flowers) that make the pace sluggish and congest the text.

With her sumptuous use of words, she evokes a rich, gothic setting, and a quietly sinister and claustrophobic atmosphere that I adored. My seventh novel, The Siege (2001) was shortlisted both for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland. Some readers may find the book's "intensity and darkness", which hovers between "gripping and overwrought", a little "heavy-handed", but the reviewer was impressed by Dunmore's "keen, close writing" and "artful use of metaphor".

Kate, the young woman who attends to both children and the house’s upkeep (among other household staff), is dedicated to her duties but longs for a life of her own in which she’s entitled to more than a leaking attic bedroom. I know the author is under no obligation to give her readers a happy ending, and I'm not sure how it could have happened in this case, but the story's resolution was just so disappointing and unsatisfying.