Wakenhyrst

Product Information

Paver is one of Britain's modern greats. This sinister, gothic chiller shows why' BIG ISSUE, Books of the Year 2019. "Something has been let loose..." In the gripping new novel by the author of The Fourteenth Letter, a lawyer in Victorian London must find a man he got off a murder charge - and who seems to have killed again . . .

Wakenhyrst - The Book Trail Wakenhyrst - The Book Trail

In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. One of my favourite things about Wakenhyrst is that it uses a distinctive medieval European depiction of nature, in this instance, the Suffolk Fens. The Fens are presented to us as this wild, unromantic, untamed space that transcends social boundaries (see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Marie de France’s Lanval). Even Wakes End’s patriarch, Edmund Sterne, with all the power that his status and gender affords, is at the mercy of the marsh. Only in this space can Maud be her true self, unrestricted by the social expectations of a landowner’s daughter. Only here can she pursue a romance with the working-class under-gardener, only amongst the mud and reeds can she exist without being sexualised or undermined for being a woman. The Suffolk Fens are to Wakenhyrst what the Yorkshire moors are to Wuthering Heights, the feral beauty of the marsh is to Maud Sterne what the unbridled heathland is to Catherine Earnshaw. Maud’s a fantastic character. As she reads her father’s journal, her opinion of him changes rapidly and she starts to subtly annoy him on purpose. She saves and befriends a magpie, hence the cover, and she strikes up a friendship with the handsome gardener, someone below her station as far as her father is concerned. Through this it highlights the power imbalance caused by poverty. To her the fen was a forbidden realm of magical creatures and she longed for it with a hopeless passion. We meet Maud as a child in the repressive isolation and secrecy of Wake’s End as she grapples with the loss of her mother and struggles under her father’s commanding presence. Maud is isolated in more than just location; as the oldest of her much younger siblings, she is alone in her daily life, alone in grieving her mother, alone in her understanding of life at Wake’s End and the desire to be out from under her father’s rule. As her father’s only daughter, she is also isolated as the only female member of her family left—unimportant, incapable, and harmless as any other woman in her father’s eyes. We move through periods of Maud’s childhood as she grows into her teenage years, as she carves space for herself within Wake’s End. She grows to realize that she can grant herself little freedoms, that her own beliefs may lie somewhere outside of what everyone else in Wakenhyrst believes, that perhaps the only thing worth believing in is the one thing she holds most dearly: the fen. There’s a richness to this story that is enhanced by its unhurried pace, by the fact that readers get to sit still within Wake’s End as threads of intrigue, mystery, and building suspense are woven steadily around us as we come to know Maud, her father, and Wakenhyrst itself throughout years of her life.

She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father’s past. Through Edmund’s journal, his entitlement of his position in the world is clear. He can treat those in his household how he pleases, as long as he keeps up appearances to society. As Maud’s account starts, she knows her mother is constantly ill, resulting in “the groaning”. Edmund’s sexual desires take precedence over his wife’s health, who repeatedly suffers miscarriages. Young Maud makes up her own version of events until she starts to read her father’s journals. Maud loves the fen and feels at home wandering its watery wilderness. However her father is scared of it, his guilt manifesting in his paranoia. The pervasive marsh smell starts to haunt him as he becomes more and more obsessed with the rantings of Alice Pyett, ironically a female spiritualist. It’s gripping and tense, and my favourite Michelle Paver book by far.

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Wakenhyrst is a gothic style horror set in the fens of East Anglia. While the characters are fictional, much of the story is based on real historical accounts; the delirious writings of a spiritualist, the disturbing paintings of asylum inmates, and the doom, a religious mural depicting the Day of Judgement. This dark, gothic tale with hook you in with its atmospheric setting of a house on the edge of the Suffolk fens, and its themes of superstition, witchcraft and religion”My only qualm with Maud was her rivalry with Ivy, a young and pretty maid in her household. However, this is rectified in Maud’s epilogue when she declares that the friction between them was pointless; Ivy simply tried to change her lot with what she could, as a working-class woman. Maud’s wealth afforded her some amount of foundational respect, yet she used her intelligence to achieve her goals. Ivy was not afforded that same respect as a maid, so had to use her looks and sexuality to get what she wanted. Maud doesn’t blame Ivy for resenting her, she was born into wealth – and as much as she had to fight because she is a woman, she realises that Ivy has had to fight not only because she is a woman, but also because she is poor. Maud understands her privilege, making the decision to financially support Ivy long after the main events in the story take place, and despite her contempt for the girl. A gripping ghost story… This is a brilliantly atmospheric read (be warned: it’s also terrifying!) with a brave, forward-thinking heroine I loved.” The gulf between these two existences was vast. There was no in-between. Either he was a murderer, or he was not.

Wakenhyrst – Michelle Paver

Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl’s longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry. Part of Edmund Stearne’s mental decline has to do with his obsession with a historical local woman, Alice Pyett, who lived during the late 1400s and allegedly experienced visions of demons and hell, before being saved by Jesus Christ and embarking on numerous pilgrimages across Europe. Throughout the book, Edmund works to translate a dictated book of her life story. I was reminded of the famous mystic, Margery Kempe, who authored (also through dictation) a book about her life (see The Book of Margery Kempe), which detailed her pilgrimages and spiritual conversations with God during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Lo and behold, when I read the authors notes I learned that the character of Alice Pyett was largely based on Kempe’s experiences. Sadly, Pyett is not initially regarded with the same favour as Kempe was in her time, often being referred to disparagingly as ‘this creature’ and ‘wretched’ in the text. Pyett’s contemporaries came very close to burning her as a Lollard, simply for professing the visions she had. Her treatment paralleled that of suspected witches in late medieval and early renaissance Britain, a malignant movement that would plague East Anglia in real life some mere 200 years after her time. Wakenhyrst is a framed narrative set in Edwardian Suffolk, at the Sterne family’s ancestral marshland home of Wakes End. The story follows the life of Maud Sterne and her account of the mysterious events leading up to a gruesome murder committed by her father. We see Maud mature into adulthood while simultaneously watching her father, Edmund, descend into madness. Wakenhyrst combines elements of all the things I adore, medieval history and religious imagery, the Anglo-Saxon language, the unromantic beauty of the East-Anglian marshes, gothic themes, visceral horror, and the astute exploration of gender and class issues in Edwardian Britain.As in Dark Matter, Paver manages the balance between outright supernaturalism and the suggestion that the horrors are psychological in origin with great skill. It is more difficult to pull this off at novel-length than in a short story, and harder now than it was 100 years ago, but she succeeds. Revisiting M R James territory with a modern feminist sensibility, Wakenhyrst is weirdly compelling.” The journals of painter and historian Edmund Stearne have been kept safely in Wake’s End since his admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane. He admitted he did it but that he never did anything wrong. 60 years later, his daughter releases his, and her, story to the world.