![]() ![]() “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. ![]() Wakenhyrst is equally brilliant, spanning fen devils, mystics and the lot of women in Edwardian England as Paver carefully circles the question of Stearne’s madness: are the devils he sees real or imagined? Twisting back through time, Stone Mothers is the story of how a covered-up murder will never lie quietly Paver is known for her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness children’s series, but she is also the author of gloriously chilling novels for adults: her Arctic winter-set ghost story Dark Matter is a work of wonder. Paver masterfully blends together two narratives – that of Stearne’s daughter, Maud, a lonely child raised in the Suffolk fens, and entries from Stearne’s diary, which Maud discovers, in which he details finding a medieval painting in a churchyard, before descending into madness. ![]()
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