MUST READS – Nov 07, 2019

MUST READS

The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (Harper Collins £8.99, 416 pp)

The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley (Harper Collins £8.99, 416 pp)

A group of old university friends spend New Year in a remote Scottish hunting lodge.

It is the first time they have got together for years, but it doesn’t take long for old tensions to resurface between Miranda, the spoilt beauty; her best friend Katie, the only singleton; Emma, the self-described ‘mousy nobody’; Samira, the former party girl, and their various partners.

With a never-ending supply of drink and the snow falling picturesquely outside the cosy lodge, what could possibly go wrong?

The slow drip of revelation as we learn more about the characters’ past and present relationships ensures that Lucy Foley’s gripping thriller stays chilling to the final page.

WakenHyrst

by Michelle Paver (Head of Zeus £8.99, 368 pp)

WakenHyrst by Michelle Paver (Head of Zeus £8.99, 368 pp)

WakenHyrst by Michelle Paver (Head of Zeus £8.99, 368 pp)

The year is 1966 and an elderly woman, Maud Stearne, is living as a recluse in an ancient Suffolk manor house when her solitude is interrupted by a journalist investigating a grotesque mystery involving her father, Edmund.

In 1913, when Maud was 16, her father, a wealthy landowner, committed an appalling murder. 

Incarcerated in Broadmoor, Edmund spent his time making detailed paintings of devils.

When they are discovered decades after his death, the artworks become a sensation, turning Maud into an unwilling celebrity.

The best-selling author Michelle Paver draws on her own family history and the folklore of Suffolk for this eerie Gothic tale of a young woman’s stand against tyranny and madness.

The Library Of Ice

by Nancy Campbell (Scribner £9.99, 336 pp)

The Library Of Ice by Nancy Campbell (Scribner £9.99, 336 pp)

The Library Of Ice by Nancy Campbell (Scribner £9.99, 336 pp)

Poet and printmaker Nancy Campbell was born in a snowstorm, which might explain her obsession with cold.

Working at a London manuscript dealer’s, she wondered: ‘Why was I spending my days conserving all this paper rather than endangered species. The more archives I catalogued, the more concerned I became about their future readers.’

When a colleague suggested she apply for a writer’s residency, she took up an offer to stay at a Greenland museum. 

The director warned that the winter darkness ‘seems to many like a terrible and nasty time’ But ‘one gets accustomed to the darkness ‘. 

Seizing this chance to ‘immerse myself in archives that nature itself had devised’, Nancy began a seven-year exploration of the Arctic climate.

The result is an icily beautiful meditation on the fascination of all things frigid.