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Rawblood
On sale
24th September 2015
Price: £19.99
Genre
In 1910, eleven-year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris believes it’s because of a congenital disease which means she must isolate herself from the world. But one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother’s grave, she forces the truth from her father: the disease is biologically impossible. A lie, to cover a darker secret.
The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child – she comes and death follows. When Iris is fifteen, she breaks her promise to remain alone all her life, and the consequences are immediate and horrific.
Read by Peter Kenny and Victoria Fox
(p) 2015 Orion Publishing Group
The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child – she comes and death follows. When Iris is fifteen, she breaks her promise to remain alone all her life, and the consequences are immediate and horrific.
Read by Peter Kenny and Victoria Fox
(p) 2015 Orion Publishing Group
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Reviews
From Victorian ghost story to anti-war polemic and back again: I raged, wept and hid under the bed covers. As full of science as it is the supernatural, this is a hauntingly brilliant virtuoso performance.
Gloriously dark and claustrophobic, Rawblood is a haunting gothic novel of intelligence and complexity. It has many echoes of the classics but is entirely its own book.
The story crosses generations, from Victorian England to World War I, and is told by a number of different voices, going back and forth in time and drawing the reader into their thrall. With a ghostly face at the window, inexplicable events and a sense of menace hanging over every page, this is one chilling gothic novel
plenty of twists and turns that had me on the edge of my seat.
Chillingly good
As a meta-examination of the Gothic genre (it's mostly set in the 19th Century( and as a straightforward tale of grisly haunting, Ward's novel is remarkably successful.
an impressively hectic spin on the Gothic tradition
Rawblood makes a powerful contribution to the British literature of the fantastic. It's an epic family saga incorporating a great Gothic house, built upon a lyrically rendered regional landscape, from which the numinous rises as if it is a natural function of the setting. There's a touch of Ted Hughes here, Emily Bronte and M.R James in this eerie and by turns moving story that spans generations. It filled my head for several evenings, and will linger there too . . . A definite book of the year for me
A gothic tale of love and madness, this atmospheric and chilling story drew me in from the first page, and kept me up at night, until I reached the last
carried off in fine style
Elegiac in its prose and haunting in its imagery, Rawblood is a precisely and beautifully woven tapestry through which threads of darkness wind their inevitable way. Ward has crafted a sweeping saga of madness in all its forms that will chill you to the bones and draw you into its murky depths
Beautifully written, in equal parts both terrifying and heart-breaking, RAWBLOOD is a dazzlingly brilliant Gothic masterpiece. Reminiscent of FRANKENSTEIN but better
A story to satisfy the most gothic of hearts. I was hooked on the very first page and [RAWBLOOD] never let me go. Sentence by sentence, Catriona Ward made herself one of my very favorite writers
Elegiac in its prose and haunting in its imagery, [Rawblood] is a precisely and beautifully woven tapestry through which threads of darkness wind their inevitable way. Ward has crafted a sweeping saga of madness in all its forms that will chill you to the bones and draw you into its murky depths
Beautifully written Gothic. It is rare to find such sumptuous prose
RAWBLOOD weaves a spell that both terrifies and mesmerizes. As each layer of mystery is peeled away, more haunting truth is revealed. The book leaves the reader breathless in its gothic tale of fear, family, blood, and love
Brilliant -- RAWBLOOD is the old-school gothic novel I have been waiting for. While it delivers everything I want from a "haunted house/family curse" story it is still stunningly original. I have never read anything like it and that's saying something.
A lush, macabre, chillingly good tale. From the modern horrors of man - medical experiments, war - to the ancient power of the natural world,The Girl from Rawblood is not only a ghost story of the highest order, but a sublime meditation on the things that hold us captive: fidelity, fear, memory, love