Twisting back through time, Stone Mothers is the story of how a covered-up murder will never lie quietly and a terrifying indictment of how the mentally ill were once treated. Now the pact they made is beginning to break, threatening her family and vulnerable daughter. Marianne has a dark history and a secret that she and her ex-boyfriend, Jesse, have kept for years. “Please, Sam, don’t make me go back,” she panics. Marianne’s reaction is extreme and disturbing. It’s in Nusstead, Marianne’s home town her husband wants her to be able to spend time with her dying mother. “‘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.Įrin Kelly’s Stone Mothers (Hodder & Stoughton) – a very different tale of Suffolk and madness – opens as Marianne is thrown into a state of shock by her husband’s surprise purchase of a flat in the revamped Nazareth hospital, formerly the East Anglia Pauper Lunatic Asylum. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse.

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.

Wakenhyrst is equally brilliant, spanning fen devils, mystics and the lot of women in Edwardian England as Paver carefully circles the question of Stearne’s madness: are the devils he sees real or imagined? Twisting back through time, Stone Mothers is the story of how a covered-up murder will never lie quietly Paver is known for her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness children’s series, but she is also the author of gloriously chilling novels for adults: her Arctic winter-set ghost story Dark Matter is a work of wonder.

Wakenhyrst by michelle paver