As Maud explains, ‘part of making Father proud was obeying his every word.’ Which includes never running in the garden, always being silent downstairs, and no animals in the house. But inside the house, he’s a tyrannical taskmaster with unbreakable rules. Outside the walls of their home, Edmund Stearn is a revered historian. Her mother is dead, and her father Edmund sees demons everywhere he looks. Our heroine Maud - feisty, put-upon, and about seven shades too curious - lives with her father, her two brothers, and a gaggle of servants in Wake’s End, an Edwardian manse on the edge of a wild fen. In this novel, the fens are a character as surely as the people who populate the pages. Marshy, untamed, and a bit intimidating, the fens of eastern England are the inspiration for chilling folktales, including a ghostly light that lures victims to their death in a bed of reeds. The town of Wakenhyrst in this novel is fictional, but it’s inspired by real Suffolk villages that perch on the verge of the fens. This weekend, take an unsettling getaway to an isolated manor house on the edge of a bleak and foreboding fen.
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