Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts at the Hay Festival on 31 May 2011.

Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2011.
Packed full of suspense, this is a tingling and chilling Gothic thriller in which nothing can quite be taken for granted. Rebecca is forced to abandon her bustling life in London for the unfamiliar village of Winterfold. So different from home, she finds it lonely and claustrophobic. When she meets Ferelith things begin to change and Rebecca soon finds herself caught up in a terrifying mystery from which there seems to be no escape. Marcus Sedgwick weaves several story strands together in this macabre tale.

Synopsis

It's summer. Rebecca is an unwilling visitor to Winterfold - taken from the buzz of London and her friends and what she thinks is the start of a promising romance. Ferelith already lives in Winterfold - it's a place that doesn't like to let you go, and she knows it inside out - the beach, the crumbling cliff paths, the village streets, the woods, the deserted churches and ruined graveyards, year by year being swallowed by the sea. Against her better judgement, Rebecca and Ferelith become friends, and during that long, hot, claustrophobic summer they discover more about each other and about Winterfold than either of them really want to, uncovering frightening secrets that would be best left long forgotten. Interwoven with Rebecca and Ferelith's stories is that of the seventeenth century Rector and Dr Barrieux, master of Winterfold Hall, whose bizarre and bloody experiments into the after-life might make angels weep, and the devil crow.

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About the Author

Marcus Sedgwick has worked in children's publishing for ten years and before that he was a bookseller. He is also a stone carver and wood engraver and illustrates all his novels.   Marcus lives in Sussex and has a young daughter, Alice.   More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation