FICTION · SUSPENSE
Sarah Rayne
Also known as: Frances Gordon, Bridget Wood
After a convent education, which included writing plays for the Lower Third to perform, Sarah Rayne embarked on a variety of jobs, but - probably inevitably - returned again and again to writing. Her first novel appeared in 1982, and since then her books have also been published in America, Holland and Germany. The daughter of an Irish comedy actor, she was for many years active in amateur theatre, and lists among her hobbies, theatre, history, music, and old houses - much of her inspiration comes from old buildings and their histories and atmospheres. To these interests, she adds ghosts and ghost stories, and - having grown up in the Sixties - good conversation around a well-stocked dinner table. Source: Goodreads
'If you're as broke as all that,' said Gillian Campbell to her godmother, 'why on earth don't you sell Teind House?'
— from Tower of Silence
Most acclaimed
A dark dividing
Journalist Harry Fizglen is sceptical when his editor asks him to investigate the background of Simone Anderson, a new Bloomsbury artist. But once he's met the enigmatic Simone, Harry is intrigued. Just what did happen to Simone's twin sister who disappeared without trace several years before? And what is the Anderson sisters' connection to another set of twin girls, Viola and Sorrel Quinton, born in London on 1st January 1900? All Harry's lines of enquiry seem to lead to the small Shropshire village of Weston Fferna and the imposing ruin of Mortmain House, standing grim and forbidding on the Welsh borders. As Harry delves into the violent and terrible history of Mortmain, in an attempt to uncover what happened to Simone and Sonia and, a century before them, to Viola and Sorrel Quinton, he finds himself drawn into a number of interlocking mysteries, each one more puzzling -- and sinister -- than the last.
The Death Chamber
Calvary Gaol, standing bleak and forbidding on the Cumbrian hillside, exerts a curious hold over Georgina Grey. For her famly's history is closely bound up in its dark and terrible past. It's there that her great-grandfather worked as a prison doctor in the 1930s; where his involvement in a bizarre experiment would change the course of his life forever. -- Dust jacket.
The Silence
Don DeLillo completed this novel just weeks before the advent of COVID-19. The Silence is the story of a different catastrophic event. Its resonances offer a mysterious solace. It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them after what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in north-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a dazzling and profoundly moving conversation about what makes us human. Never has the art of fiction been such an immediate guide to our navigation of a bewildering world. Never have DeLillo's prescience, imagination and language been more illuminating and essential. --