In a large family you hear a great many stories. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. It's only after she's redeemed by hardship that she's given a second chance to be redeemed by love. With Kate's departure for Canada and Rob's for the front, destitute times at home force Cathy into self-reliance. Kate makes the first crack in their hermetically sealed world, which World War I eventually bursts wide open. Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both.
In true gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. Their father, whose mental state always has been slightly precarious, is committed to an asylum in the country.
Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family for a bohemian life on the Continent. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England.
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