She helped Cole in the garden and he taught her how to put four seeds in every hole: One for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.”

This was my first Paver read having heard some good things about her, and it thrust me straight into a solid Gothic historical yarn with some genuinely creepy moments! This dark, gothic tale will 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' Sun. This cleverly written suspenseful historical really gives a great sense of the Time period with the fascinating journal entries help drive the narrative. Paver herself said it was the best book she's written, and you can see why: it's compulsively readable and savagely intelligent' The Roaring Bookworm.I had never heard of a ‘Doom’ and on googling the Wenhaston Doom that Paver used as inspiration for the Wakenhyrst Doom, I found that the images were fantastic! Father was a very distant and cold character, quietly tyrannical in his running of the house, against which Maud rebelled, and focussed on his work on the writings of an obscure female mystic from the fifteenth century, Alice Pyett; Maman suffers from the triple disabilities of being female, foreign and “an inherited flaw” impeding her ability to bear children. Or perhaps a desperate attempt to retain some bodily autonomy in the face of a husband who refuses contraceptives and refutes the medical advice that he ought not to expect her to pay the “debt of matrimony”, at least “not every night”. Hence, perhaps, the mysterious tonics and strange practices with dead men’s hands. The actions of Father are controlling and abusive as he The windswept wilderness, the old creaking house, the old man Jubel who lives rough in the fen and the eerie going’s on, all equate to a fabulously atmospheric read. Speaking of ludicrous phenomena, I really enjoyed how Paver explores the similarity between the practises of Maud’s religious father, and the superstitious practices of the villagers and house staff. Edmund rebukes the superstitions of the common folk, yet practises not only religious customs but also carries a hagstone, renowned by locals to ward off bad spirits (though he claims that he keeps it simply as a childhood memento). Maud highlights the hypocrisy of the ‘rules’ each side enforces: “What made these two sets of rules so dangerous was that you got punished if you mixed them up, but you couldn’t always tell what kind of rule it was. If you spilled salt, you had to toss a pinch over your left shoulder; but was that to bind the devil…or was it because Judas Iscariot spilled salt at the last supper?” Maud's battle has begun. 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.

Set at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maud is a nine-year old at the start of the novel and sixteen at the conclusion of her narrative, a girl on the cusp of adulthood in a world on the cusp of modernity, but still treated as a child of the Victorians by her father, the historian Edmund Stearne, and other patriarchal authority figure in society around her: the rector, Mr Broadstairs, and the doctor, Dr Grayson. Maud’s father’s discovery of an unsettling, grotesque painting of devils marks a shift in life at Wake’s End. Always a controlling, but logical, man, Edmund Stearne has changed since first setting eyes on the painting—and Maud notices. Paranoid and erratic, Edmund’s work as a historian comes to intersect with the history of the painting—the Doom—and his obsession becomes Maud’s mission to understand. The life of Alice Pyett, a woman who claimed God spoke through her centuries ago, has absorbed him as the focus of his work, but now her diary entries, which Edmund is translating and which readers are able to read, fuel his own paranoia. Through firsthand journal entries, readers—and Maud—come to know Edmund’s thoughts intimately as he faces what he fears he set loose in discovering the Doom. Something ancient, something uncontrollable, something evil. The atmosphere and folklore of the fens comes to life, the utterly compelling story unfolding in a way that is impossible to look away from. There are secrets at Wake’s End and secrets her father keeps and Maud will have them unraveled before her. But as the story unfolds, not all is clear; is it madness or is history repeating itself? Is Edmund paranoid or has something actually been wakened? Is there truth to the local superstitions of the Fens? Though a quietly told tale, Wakenhyrst rises to a thrilling crescendo that is unsettling and surprising.A brilliantly atmospheric read (be warned: it's also terrifying!) with a brave, forward-thinking heroine I loved' Good Housekeeping. Marianne has a dark history and a secret that she and her ex-boyfriend, Jesse, have kept for years. Now the pact they made is beginning to break, threatening her family and vulnerable daughter. I loved the whole ‘upstairs, downstairs’ aspect of the story because due to tragic (frustrating circumstances) the Lady of the house, Maud’s mother, passes away early on. So she’s raised by her patriarchal, awful Father.

Basically a coming-of-age story where our narrator, Maud, starts the tale at age 8 or 9 and we see her through the years leading up to the climax that happens when she’s 16. I really enjoyed the elements of folk-horror Paver used in the novel. Images of swamp demons with wide mouths and frog-like eyes, impish creatures with swampy green horns, they paint a very different picture to the antiquated Christian red-skinned devils so often depicted in medieval dooms.

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. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen. But all that helped to enhance the atmosphere of the tale. It was more psychological than physical terror (except for what had been done to Maude's mother), as is usually the case in such books, and it worked really well.

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. The best way for a groaning to end was with a bloody chamberpot, as that was soonest over. Second-best was a dead baby and worst was a live one, because Maman cried when it died – which it always did. Maman was careful never to cry in front of Father, as he didn’t like it.A Times Best Book of 2019. 'Paver is one of Britain's modern greats. This sinister, gothic chiller shows why' BIG ISSUE, Books of the Year 2019. Like Alice, Maman had never been allowed to do anything; she’d always had things done to her. She had been ‘given in marriage’ and ‘permitted’ fine clothes – although only if Father approved of them. For others that are looking for a spooky October read-- this story has no chilling or scary moments! I can't understand why that is even stated in the Publisher's summary. There is nothing in this book that comes close to being spooky, it is all cruelty and unfairness in the life of an intelligent young girl.