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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Myerson, J. 2016 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"Bloody brilliant."--Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson's beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies--past and present--haunting a picturesque country cottage.
Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn't been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It's idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them.
One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead--surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There's something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil.
Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there's something in the house. Children's whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard.
Has Mary's grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her...'
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This overlong novel from British author Myerson (The Quickening) focuses on two families living in the same village near Ipswich in Essex, separated by 150 years. In the present, grief-stricken Mary Coles and her husband move to a run-down cottage with a large back garden, once a farmyard, to seek a new start after a tragedy that's only gradually revealed. Meanwhile, in the past, 13-year-old Eliza narrates the story of a red-haired stranger, James Dix, whose sudden arrival at her family's farm leads inexorably to trouble. Dix is a seducer whose tendency to violence gradually becomes clear, and wary Eliza is only one of his targets. Back in the present, Mary's married neighbor, Eddie, begins paying inappropriate attention to her. The forward-looking visions of Eliza's four-year-old sister, Lottie, and Mary's visions of the past connect the experiences of the two families, but this contrivance fails to unite the two stories into a suspenseful whole. Agent: Karolina Sutton, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A long-dead family haunts a ramshackle cottage, the new home of grieving Mary and Graham Coles. Despite the dark presences, Mary is drawn to the house. Far away from London, the cottage offers her a refuge from well-meaning friends and unexpected reminders of her recently deceased daughters. (We don't find out what happened to those daughters until well into the book.) Graham hopes the move will pull Mary out of her numb despair. Ghostly steps creak, doors slam, and a strange red-haired young man appears outside one moment only to disappear the next. Rather than being alarmed, Mary welcomes the hauntings. Myerson intertwines Mary's further descent into grief with the tale of the family who inhabited the cottage 150 years earlier. After a violent storm, they found a red-haired young man beneath a massive tree uprooted in the yard. Thirteen-year-old Eliza immediately distrusts him, but her six younger siblings soon adore the mysterious James Dix. Four-year-old Lottie has her doubts, but then Lottie also believes she was once a dog; that she was once dead; that a woman named Merricales, wearing trousers, haunts the kitchen; that Merricales is mourning the horrible deaths of her two daughters. A poisonous creature, indeed, James nonetheless worms his way into Eliza's heart, with devastating consequences. More than a century later, Mary finds herself the object of her neighbor Eddie's attentions. Eddie, very solicitous and rather married, is eager to talk about Mary's girls, which is a relief to Mary but a betrayal as far as Graham is concerned. Myerson (The Quickening, 2013, etc.) twines a delightfully twisted tale, exposing the dark underbelly of love and the gaping, raw wounds of grief. She deftly holds back secrets, doling them out carefully, as if the reader, too, can only face so much horror at a time. By turns terrifying and heartbreaking; an enthralling spine-chiller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On the first page, it's clear that something indescribably horrific has happened in the past. In the present, Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, are buying a farmhouse, trying to escape the grief of a loss so tragic that Mary describes it as having stopped her heart. The narrative moves seamlessly from past to present in the same location in the English countryside; narrating the sections in the past is 13-year-old Eliza, oldest of eight children, who tells of the arrival of city man James Dix, found under an oak tree felled in a storm, who stays to work on her family's farm and to woo her. Both Mary and Eliza's sister, four-year-old Lottie (who blurts out events in the past and future that stun her family), are attuned to the supernatural and experience sightings between the two time periods, as their full stories are gradually revealed. Myerson has become known for her skill as a teller of particularly dreadful stories, but never before has she so vividly limned the pain felt by so many of her well-drawn characters. Despite its length, this novel is impossible to put down; it will be read compulsively to learn the what of what has happened, if not the why. A stunner.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN WE THINK of a haunted house, we imagine its ghosts to be the restless souls of previous occupants, kept by some unresolved horror from complete departure. But perhaps it's possible that the deep grief of someone in the present can actually penetrate the past - can, in effect, haunt those who dwelled here long ago. In Julie Myerson's new novel, "The Stopped Heart," Mary and Graham Coles seek refuge away from London, deep in the Suffolk countryside at the edge of a village, buying an old cottage complete with an overgrown garden and orchard. It's soon apparent that they're enduring a raw sorrow and are hoping for the relief of a fresh start in a place where nobody knows their story. The reader doesn't know their story either, not for a few hundred pages, though hints at the nature of their loss gradually bring their misery not only into present-day focus but also into a curious alignment with events of the past. "The Stopped Heart" has two distinct, interwoven narratives. A first-person chronicle opens the novel, the voice of a young girl who lived in this cottage a century and a half earlier. Eliza's perceptive descriptions of her family and their domestic life, which changes after a redheaded stranger comes to stay, provide vivid testimony to a series of events that grow increasingly horrifying. The other story, which unfolds mostly in close third person, is about Mary's modern-day attempt to settle in. She is haunted by her own despair and heartache - "The lump of grief that never leaves her throat. The hot, shocked space behind her eyes" - as well as increasingly disturbing glimpses of a redheaded man nobody else can see and the fleeting sounds of footsteps overhead, murmuring voices, the noise of phantom children playing nearby. Is she going mad? Or is the history of the cottage somehow seeping into her existence? The novel's parallel stories are told in alternating passages, with only space breaks to indicate the shift between them, which makes keeping alert to the distinction utterly crucial. This may sound like too much work, but it's really not. Instead, there's a rhythm to these purposeful leaps between past and present that becomes part of the experience of reading this increasingly gripping novel, which, like Kate Atkinson's somewhat similarly situated "Human Croquet," rewards the attentive reader. Just as Mary sees and hears traces of former lives in the cottage, Eliza's little sister, Lottie, often makes knowing and matter-of-fact references to the future inhabitants of these rooms. Though nobody else in the family understands what she's talking about, Eliza is inspired to name her kitten "Merricoles" for the flickering future presence of Mary Coles, a "pretty lady with black hair and a very sad face" whose profound unhappiness has made time sufficiently porous to create a ghostly presence. As the parallel events in both strands of the narrative advance, the connecting echoes increase until there's an intersection of sorts: Something from the past is discovered in the present, where it has been buried in the garden for 150 years. Though Myerson is the author of nine novels, it's the first of her three nonfiction books that's most clearly a forerunner to "The Stopped Heart." In "Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever Lived in Our House," published in 2004, she researched the stories of those who lived in her 19th-century Victorian terraced house in Clapham, up to her own family's arrival in 1988. She was particularly struck by the discovery that another writer lived there in 1881, a writer with children the same ages as Myerson's. But that's exactly the sort of gold for which she was panning. The German word unheimlich captures best what Myerson writes about so well: that eerie sense when something is both familiar and unfamiliar. The English word for that is "uncanny." KATHARINE WEBER, the author of five novels and a memoir, has just completed her sixth novel. She is the Richard L. Thomas visiting professor of creative writing at Kenyon College.