Cold Boy's Wood

Carol Birch

$15.95

Publication Date: May 1st, 2022

Publisher:

Apollo

ISBN:

9781838939434

Pages:

352

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Description

Fusing the ghost story with sharp, psychological insight, this is a brilliant and timely novel about loneliness, buried secrets and the havoc they play on the mind from Booker-shortlisted author Carol Birch.

Did you hear? Big landslip over by Ercol. Last night. The road into Gully's closed off. They found a body. Got police tape. All that stuff. They only do that for murder, don't they? Murder!

A body has been uncovered in a mudslide just outside the village of Andwiston. In the pub they talk of murder, but Dan – sometime mechanic, constant drunk – is finding it hard to sift through his jumbled memories. Watching him from the dark is Lorna, a lost soul living in the woods, haunted by ghosts and a vision from her childhood: a cold boy standing alone in Gallinger's field.

About the Author

Carol Birch is the award-winning writer of twelve novels. Her first, Life in the Palace, won the David Higham Award for Fiction (Best First Novel of the Year), and her second novel, The Fog Line, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Jamrach's Menagerie, published in 2011, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Galaxy National Book Award (Waterstone's UK Author of the Year), and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the London Book Award. Born in Manchester, she now lives in Lancaster.

Praise for Cold Boy's Wood

"At once elusive and intense, this suspenseful psychological mystery teems with ghosts from the past as a body is unearthed in a rural village. Subtle in style and fierce in characterisation, Carol Birch’s Cold Boy’s Wood is a haunting psychological enigma." --LoveReading

"Although a haunting murder mystery, Cold Boy's Wood is also a double portrait of damaged souls: Lorna, who lives rough, and Dan, an alcoholic mechanic adopted by stray cats. Few crime novels are so moving." The Times Crime Club

“Breathtaking. . . . Magical. . . . Melville meets Dickens. . . . A moving, fantastically exciting sea tale.” —The Washington Post on Jamrach's Menagerie

“One of the best stories I’ve ever read; an extraordinarily good and completely original book.” —A. S. Byatt on Jamrach's Menagerie