The Silver family move from the city to the coast to begin a new life in a vast, mysterious house near Dover. But when their mother Lily is killed on assignment, the intense closeness between twins Miranda and Eliot, and between them and their gentle father, has a hole punched deep into its heart.
Furthermore, things are not well with the house, which creaks atop the cliffs, malignly confuses visitors in its mazy warren of rooms, and grows white winter apples in the garden at a time when then branches should be bare. Miranda, with her appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to her home's four walls and to the women that have inhabited them than she is to her brother and father. Slowly she seems to disappear before their very eyes . . . until one dark night she vanishes entirely.
We hear the story from the survivors, in a captivating, fragmented account which blends myth and memory, magic and suffering, fear and love. It is a tale with roots in Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe, but in which Oyeyemi's distinctive voice and dazzling sensibility fulfil the promise of a precocious talent.
- ISBN10 033050570X
- ISBN13 9780330505703
- Publish Date 2 January 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Pan Macmillan
- Imprint Picador
- Format eBook
- Language English