A Spell of Winter

About This Project

Helen Dunmore’s award winning novel, A Spell of Winter, is one of my favourite books by the author. The story begins at the turn of the century and follows the relationship of a brother and sister who are left abandoned by their mother and raised together in a country mansion. The two main characters have a deep and passionate relationship that will eventually destroy them. The Sunday Times review quite rightly refers to the book  as  a ‘gripping read with incredible emotional intensity.’ If you do read the book be prepared to be shocked and upset. However it is the kind of novel that you get drawn into- I really did feel as if I had been transported back to a lost, unreachable world- a world moving ferociously and violently towards a new century. A Spell of Winter is a haunting novel that never quite leaves you. Towards the end of the novel, the sister Catherine, reflects on the loss of her brother in the Great War.

“I’ve stopped imagining the way he might have died. It doesn’t help but I still wonder how hard it was. Did he walk, then crawl and then shrink back to nothing but a cry in the darkness?  Nobody came.  I  would have come. Nothing would have stopped me. But I was picking apples in the orchard….I’d left no room for him. There was always the two of us……….we slipped like a fish over the lip of our mother’s body. He waited for me. He waits again.”

Other  reviews make the following comments about the book:

“A Spell of Winter reads so much like Jane Eyre that one feels one ought to shout: Charlotte Brontë is back!”  (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

“An intensely gripping book. Tense, dark and beautifully crafted, the book that won its author the Orange Prize is one that will be hard to forget . . . written
so seductively that some passages sing out from the page, like music for the
eyes.”  (Sunday Times)

“Helen Dunmore’s spellbinding, lyrical prose is close to poetry. She writes
like an angel and the compelling turn-of-the-century story she so skillfully
unfolds in A Spell of Winter makes the emotions churn and tingle. . . .
This is a marvellous novel about forbidden passions and the terrible consequences
of thwarted love. It is also about the almost mystical bond between mothers and
daughters, and I defy any woman to read the final paragraphs without tears
streaming down her face. . . . Dunmore is one of our finest writers.” (The Daily Mail)