Monthly Archives: August 2013

Ghost Hawk by Susan Cooper

Ghost Hawk dustjacketWhen Little Hawk was eleven he was taken blindfolded into the winter forest by his father and left there alone; in three months time, should he survive, he would return to his village a man. But the world Little Hawk comes back to is not the one his father knew: settlers from across the sea have arrived in Wampanoag territory bringing with them fine goods, new religions, violence and disease. Amongst the rising tensions between the tribes and the newcomers, the lives of Little Hawk and one of the settlers, a young boy named John, become irrevocably and fatally linked.

Ghost Hawk is an emotionally complex, finely-wrought tale which recreates the world of seventeenth-century America with both historical fidelity and respect. This is a superb book which deserves to become a future classic, but it is by no means a comforting read: Cooper takes bold risks with both her characters and her narrative, and a sense of the unquiet ghosts of the past haunts the book’s pages. Highly recommended.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/view/33260

Iremonger: Heap House by Edward Carey

Iremonger dustjacketAt the heart of Heap House, amongst the piles of rubbish that cover the London borough of Filching, Clod Iremonger can hear his bath-plug speaking to him. It says ‘James Henry Hayward’. But it’s not just his bath-plug: his Uncle Aliver’s forceps say ‘Percy Hotchkiss’, whilst his grandmother’s mantlepiece says ‘Augusta Ingrid Ernesta Hoffmann’, and Cousin Bornobby’s lady’s shoe says ‘Cecily Grant’. Something very strange is going on which portends disaster for the Heaps and the whole house of Iremonger, and, with the arrival of an outsider named Lucy Pennant, everything seems on the brink of cataclysmic change.

This inventive and continually surprising novel evokes a darkly distorted image of Victorian London which is at once frightening, grotesque and often very funny. There are parallels here with Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy or China Mieville’s novels, but the world of Iremonger is distinctively Edward Carey’s own, and the twin first-person narratives from which the story is constructed are compelling. A peculiar but superbly-realised fantasy and the first book in what promises to be an excellent trilogy.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/books/view/33262