Epistolary novels are always a bit of a tightrope. How do you explain, particularly in this day and age, why people are writing lengthy letters to each other with pen and paper. In her latest novel The Sleepwalkers, Scarlett Thomas walks this tightrope, mostly successfully, to deliver an unsettling, gothic mystery that holds its secrets…
Rosie Andrews pulls a slight bait-and-switch in her debut novel The Leviathan. Set in the 17th Century, the first half of The Leviathan concerns itself with a possible witch trial before pivoting into something even darker. The short prologue ends with the ominous words: “She is awake.” But it will be a while before those…
Laura Purcell’s debut, The Silent Companions was a creepy gothic thriller. That book featured everything a reader might want from this style of tale – asylums, strange villagers, a dark manor house, whispers of witchcraft and of course the titular Companions – wooden effigies that seemed to move on their own. She followed that up…
I’m slowly acquainting myself with Angela Carter’s writing, and when I saw The Magic Toyshop in a Sydney bookshop, I had to have it. This is the blurb: One night Melanie walks through the garden in her mother’s wedding dress. The next morning her world is shattered. Forced to leave the comfortable home of her…
Kate Morton is one of my favourite mainstream Australian writers; the type of books she writes – gothic-style mystery with old houses and buried secrets – are my favourite. There’s something incredibly romantic about big old houses, once-beautiful but now tangled old gardens, yellowing letters, haunting secrets, ghostly apparitions … they put me in a…
Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain generally make good choices when it comes to accepting movie roles. Here, Wasikowska plays Edith, an aspiring author living with her highly regarded builder father in Buffalo, New York, at the dawn of the 20th century. She has grown up haunted (literally) by the loss of her mother. Cursed with…
