Boys Don’t Cry: ‘I can’t remember ever reading something so moving. Kindle Edition. The Ladies’ Midnight Swimming Club. Faith Hogan. Jennifer Down. From Publishers Weekly Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets.

Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family for a bohemian life on the Continent. Their father, whose mental state always has been slightly precarious, is committed to an asylum in the country. 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. In true gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface.

Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both. Kate makes the first crack in their hermetically sealed world, which World War I eventually bursts wide open. With Kate’s departure for Canada and Rob’s for the front, destitute times at home force Cathy into self-reliance. It’s only after she’s redeemed by hardship that she’s given a second chance to be redeemed by love.

Though the setting is classic gothic, the novel is peculiarly modern with its precise, unforgiving depictions of childhood and madness, its dark sensuality and surprising, artful use of metaphor. The intensity and darkness of the world Dunmore creates teeters between gripping and overwrought; some may find the story heavy-handed. Still, Dunmore’s keen, close writing is deserving of Britain’s prestigious Orange Prize, which the novel won when it was first published in the U.

Forecast: Dunmore’s stock has been steadily rising with the publication in the U. Copyright Cahners Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In the years before World War I, Cathy, the narrator, and her brother grow up on their grandfather’s impoverished English estate.

Their mother abandoned them when they were small, and their father dies after being institutionalized. Except for the ministrations of the maid, Kate, and the interference of the repulsive governess, they are left on their own.

It seems inevitable when their closeness takes an unnatural and destructive turn. A wealthy neighbor is refurbishing a nearby estate and offers Cathy glimpses of a larger world, but she cannot bring herself to respond. In the meantime, there are threats to her hermetic existence–the governess’ intrusions become intolerable; first Kate and her brother, Rob, decide to leave.

And finally the war comes, taking most of the neighboring men with it, so that Cathy is left with her ailing grandfather to scratch out an existence on the farm. It’s only when the war ends and she is alone that she is ready to break away. With a handful of characters and rich, ripe prose, Dunmore creates a compelling tale of obsession.

All rights reserved –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Read more. Brief content visible, double tap to read full content. Full content visible, double tap to read brief content. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! About the author Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Helen Dunmore. Read more Read less. Customer reviews. How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. The book starts slow, but then the writer builds a rhythm that puts you in Catherine’s world and mind. The maturity of Catherine, even though she lives in a world with limited experiences, is amazing and is possible because she accepts what is and keeps an even appearance to the outside world.

One person found this helpful. With this she won the first Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction in This book is too beautiful for me to review so I will just share some of my thoughts. How easily I see that this book had to win the Orange Prize. What a wonderfully drawn story. A Spell of Winter is an exquisite story of an illicit relationship between siblings.

The thought may make one go “ewww”, but this book is written so tastefully and beautifully that I do not think I can recommend it highly enough. It is quite possibly going to be my 1 read of the year. I cared about all of the characters although there were very few main characters. There were things that occurred that I anticipated and also a lot that surprised me. I liked the way Dunmore wrote about plants, fruits, etc.

I love being able to smell a fresh pear when I read about one. Self publishing. Share Embed Flag. TAGS download dunmore harriet kindle website ebook downloads author publisher penguin. You also want an ePaper? If yes you visit a website that really true. If you want to download this ebook, i provide downloads as a pdf, kindle, word, txt, ppt, rar and zip.

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Helen dunmore a spell of winter download

I climb over the gate into First Field. It should have been ploughed by now so that the frosts can break up the big clods of earth into sweet-smelling, crumbled spring soil. There is an awkward turn here by the hedge and the plough always swings out in a curve and spoils the clean line of furrows flowing up to the horizon.

In a frost like this I could have walked on the wave-like crests of the furrow without crumbling them. The earth is iron hard, the frost a week deep.

But no one has ploughed. The Semple boys are gone. He will plough the field himself, he said, rather than see the land go to waste. But I know he never will. The field is lumpy with half-remembered patterns of cultivation. It is fine soil, well-drained and rich. This is where we stood to shoot the pigeons that took the grain.

They came out of the woods, never seeing us or remembering the deaths of a previous season. We must have shot hundreds over the years. Rank heaps of weeds blacken in the frost. The rabbits are bold enough to take the gun from your hand now, said old Semple. It will take years to root up the corn-cockle and poppies.

There are no young Semples any more. George went first, then Michael, then Theodore. The Semple boys never had their names shortened, even when they were children in big boots kicking up the dust on their way through the lanes to school. They did not go to church with the other families in the village: they walked three miles across the fields to a tiny chapel where the same six families met week after week to share their passion for the Lord.

The beard is greyer than the hair on his head. He has always been clean-shaven, but he will not let his wife shave him now. This was where Rob shot the hare. It was bad luck to shoot a hare, they said in the kitchens even as they took it from us and exclaimed over its size and the fine roast it would make. She came like running water over the rise in the field, her ears flat to her body, her big legs bounding in great sure leaps. We had only been after rabbits.

Rob swung up his gun and shot her. We ran to where she was lying, big ripples running through her flesh as she felt the wound. She was hit in the back legs and there were white bits of bone bubbling in the dark mess of blood. Her lips were drawn back over her teeth. She gave a buck in his hands then she was still and her eyes began to film at once, though blood dripped steadily out from the hole in her thigh.

I thought of leverets lying still as death, waiting for their mother to come home. He bent down and pulled up a tuft of grass, then wiped the stick carefully with it until there was no trace of blood left. She was a bagful of blood, dripping, not the beautiful thing she had been. Give it to me. She was heavy, and warm. Much heavier than I would have thought, from the way she leapt down the field. My arm ached as we walked back to the house, and the hare banged against my legs.

Rob carried my gun as well as his own. Two of the Semple boys were working in the woods with their father. Theodore and Michael. They were planting young beech where Grandfather had had to take down an oak that was rotten to the heart. It might have been there a thousand years or more, Rob said. The Semple boys were twelve or thirteen then, a couple of years older than Rob.

They stopped digging to look at the hare. Theodore looked intently at it, as if he were imagining what it would taste like. We often gave them rabbits, but hare was richer, different, darker meat. I thought of it hanging in the pantry, with blood coagulating in a white china dish under it. It was always cold in there, because the pantry faced north and there were big, chill marble slabs on which meat rested.

Wire mesh covered a small window which looked out to a bank of earth. There was always a faint, iron smell of blood. You had to know how long to hang each creature.

So long for a piece of venison, so long for a pheasant or a hare. Grandfather knew everything about hanging animals.

Like you called people corpses. I walk up the frozen field. I cannot damage the earth, or anything that is in it. The rooks circle low, flapping their big wings emptily.

Cold stings my cheeks and I walk faster, tucking my hands under my elbows to keep them warm in the squirrel fur. I should have brought my fur gloves, too. At the top of the field I stop and look back at the house, where one thin plume of smoke goes straight up into the sky. It is my fire. All the other chimneys are cold. Later Elsie Shell will come up from the village and light the kerosene stove in the back kitchen and cook my dinner.

She will bring butter and eggs in her basket, and a new loaf. I am used to plain. Elsie shudders exaggeratedly as she goes away in the early December dusk. She wants to come and live here again, with Annie and Mrs Blazer and the others, the way it used to be. It is never going to be the way it was. I tell her she ought to think of getting a job in the new drapery at Over Loxton. There is money there. They are setting up the shop in a big way, hoping to catch trade from half the county.

Elsie could sit in a black dress behind the counter, waiting for the little cylinders of change to whizz back along the wire. But would they want Elsie with her kitchen hands and easy way of talking? And Elsie likes coming here. And I like being alone. You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop there may as well never have been any life at all.

A house dies as quickly as a body. Soon the house will be as it was when my grandfather first came here with my mother still a baby. He had imagined the way it would be, with lights burning, and fires, and people moving to and fro, and births in the bedrooms. Everything had stopped when he stopped being able to imagine it any more. I should have asked him more questions when he was alive.

If I shut my eyes I see him now, with my mother in his arms, wrapped in a long coat and tramping round the house he was going to buy, the future he was going to buy, the life he was going to buy. None of us had ever mapped it. My feet are beginning to hurt with the cold that strikes up through the soles of my boots. It is not a day for standing still. But now through the black limbs of the trees I see the country of its tiles, where we sat and baked in the valleys on simmering hot summer days, where we hauled ourselves up through skylights, kicking wildly, where we clung to chimney stacks as we felt for the next foothold.

I see long rows of blank, staring windows. I am too far away to see the paint curling on the window frames, the marks of damp and rot. When Grandfather was alive the struggle to keep out water and wind went on and on. There was never enough money for the army of workmen that was needed. One of the Semple boys would be taken out of the fields to slosh paint on to window frames, or scaffolding would be cobbled together and a man sent up on to the roof to pour liquid tar on to the worst leaks in the valleys.

Grandfather would go round the house with Rob, showing him where a patch of brickwork was crumbling, or the streak of a hairline crack was beginning to race and widen. All these things were like symptoms of a disease that could never be put right, only kept at bay for a year or two.

Grandfather never took my arm and pointed it up towards a missing tile, though I knew as much about the house as Rob did. I watched it, and he never did. I knew where its walls trapped sunlight and fed it back to you when you leaned against them after dusk.

I knew where the pears ripened first against the kitchen-garden wall, and how to reach inside the apricot net, twist out a rose-freckled apricot and cover up the gap with leaves.

I knew the long white rows of attics where Kate and Eileen slept, reflected in their spotted looking-glass. I knew the yeasty smell of the cellars where beer was brewed for the house. I put my finger into the head and sniffed hops and malt and once I turned the spigot and drank thin new beer out of my hands until the cellar walls spun round me. I slept all afternoon under the mulberry tree, and when Rob came to find me my dress was splattered with black mulberry juice.

I knew the icy gush of pump water on a blazing July afternoon when Rob and I took turns to work the handle and let the water pulse out over our arms. It was my house, too. I had the smell of it in my clothes and on my skin. The sky is not going to clear. Mist rises off the ground and mixes with the thickening grains of cold in the air.

The sun is fading. Perhaps it is going to snow. It is winter, my season. He was born in June, and I was born in the middle of the night, on the 21st of December.

My winter excitement quickened each year with the approach of darkness. I wanted the thermometer to drop lower and lower until not even a trace of mercury showed against the figures.

I wanted us to wake to a kingdom of ice where our breath would turn to icicles as it left our lips, and we would walk through tunnels of snow to the outhouses and find birds fallen dead from the air. I willed the snow to lie for ever, and I turned over and buried my head under the pillow so as not to hear the chuckle and drip of thaw.

I look at the house, still and breathless in the frost. I have got what I wanted. A spell of winter hangs over it, and everyone has gone. Reprinted with permission from Grove Atlantic, Inc.

All rights reserved. About the Book Disturbing love and underlying horror govern the hermetic world of this Gothic novel set in early twentieth-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother abandons them when they are young, and their father dies after being institutionalized.

The children live with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their dependable maid, Kate, and a malicious tutor, Miss Gallagher. Together they forge a passionate refuge for themselves while the world outside moves to the brink of war.

Against this backdrop, cruelty and eroticism lurk beneath every surface. Kate and Rob finally leave for Canada and then the war comes, taking most of the neighboring men with it, so that Cathy is left with her ailing grandfather on the farm. Questions for Discussion 1.

A Spell of Winter is considered a literary Gothic novel. When it began in the late-eighteenth century, Gothicism emphasized experiences connected with subterranean dungeons, secret passageways, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, etc.

What motifs does the author use to create this atmosphere? Which eerie features are grounded in reality? Which ones are mysterious? The author begins the novel with a flashback of Kate delivering a scary story by the fire to Rob and Cathy pp. Discuss the concept of a narrative being pleasurably terrifying. Why do you think people enjoy being scared by stories? What does she mean? What kind of face forces people into shame? Contrast this with the shame that Miss Gallagher attempts to stir up in people.

Throughout the text, the reader encounters graphic descriptions of smells-numerous flowers, perspiring bodies, dry rot, lemons, the fresh sweat of a horse, and so on.

What literary purpose do these all these olfactory references serve? Clearly, smells assist and can trigger memory. What else boosts memory in this story and why is it so important? Both servants fiercely guard the mysteries of the family heritage from Rob and Cathy.

This inverts common behavior, resulting in outsiders who are better informed about the family than the family itself. What effect does this have on Cathy? Having abandoned her family, the mother remains a topic mostly avoided by the men at the estate.

But Cathy has difficulty forgetting and forgiving. What does this mean to Cathy? Bullivant want Cathy to see these works? In what kind of reality does Cathy exist?

What relation do these physical landscapes have to the country estate? How do they correspond to the emotional landscape of the characters? Can you think of other enclosed spaces to which the author might be alluding?

These are the words of Cathy after her abortion. Blood is mentioned numerous times in the text. Give more examples. Why did the author choose blood as a definitive symbol? The novel takes place at the turn-of-the-century, when modernization is beginning to sweep across Europe.

Consider how modernization has changed, and sanitized, our subjection to bodily functions. Do you think this displacement makes it difficult for characters in a modern setting to have the same Gothic sensibilities as those of characters in A Spell of Winter? Do you agree with this? Ownership of the estate, in strictly metaphorical terms, figures prominently throughout the text.

How does Cathy feel about the home? What about Grandfather? About the author Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations. Read more Read less. Customer reviews. How customer reviews and ratings work Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon. Top reviews Most recent Top reviews. Top reviews from the United States. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Verified Purchase. The book starts slow, but then the writer builds a rhythm that puts you in Catherine’s world and mind. The maturity of Catherine, even though she lives in a world with limited experiences, is amazing and is possible because she accepts what is and keeps an even appearance to the outside world.

One person found this helpful. With this she won the first Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction in This book is too beautiful for me to review so I will just share some of my thoughts. How easily I see that this book had to win the Orange Prize.

What a wonderfully drawn story. A Spell of Winter is an exquisite story of an illicit relationship between siblings. The thought may make one go “ewww”, but this book is written so tastefully and beautifully that I do not think I can recommend it highly enough.

It is quite possibly going to be my 1 read of the year. I cared about all of the characters although there were very few main characters. There were things that occurred that I anticipated and also a lot that surprised me.

I liked the way Dunmore wrote about plants, fruits, etc. I love being able to smell a fresh pear when I read about one. I loved the way the book was written and to me, it read like a Virago.

I can’t wait to get my hands on more books by Helen Dunmore. I hope she has a very long list of books that she has written. I wish that I could give it more than five stars.

It’s okay. Nothing to write home about, but for any reader who is piqued, read it. It won’t hurt you, but be warned, the last half is boring. This haunting and evocative novel was the first Orange Prize Winner and set a high standard for future hopefuls. Helen Dunmore creates a world which is at once understandable and yet totally different. Rob and Catherine live in virtual isolation in the crumbling old house belonging to their grandfather. It is gradually revealed to us that their mother has left and is living abroad, while their father, unable to cope without her, has been admitted to a sanitorium.

We see events through the eyes of Cathy – a young girl who so resembles her mother that her grandfather can hardly bear to look at her, while their governess, the boy hating Miss Gallagher, harbours an obsessive and unhealthy love for her. Only Kate, the no nonsense Irish servant, brings some kind of stability to the children. As Cathy and Rob grow older, the outside world intrudes. Cathy has a suitor, in the form of a rich neighbour; while Rob has the beautiful Livvy – as light as Cathy is dark.

Yet, Rob and Cathy are thrown together too much, with too many secrets to bind them together. This is a novel of forbidden love, family secrets and how Cathy gradually becomes a woman and learns to understand what drove her mother away. This is a quiet and thought provoking read, which really packs a punch.

Helen Dunmore has long been one of my favourite authors and I enjoyed revisiting this early novel. As Cathy looks back on past events in her life we encounter past inhabitants of the house; her brother Rob, the Irish housekeeper Kate, the mysterious Eileen and numerous servants employed from the local village.

Cathy and Rob’s mother, who was a baby when she arrived with Cathy’s grandfather at the country house, left when Cathy and Rob were very young. Their grandfather has retreated into his study from which he very rarely emerges and so Rob and Cathy are largely left to their own devices apart from the able assistance and love of their housekeeper and friend, Kate.

Secrets and lies are cemented into the very brickwork and foundation of the house and its real and metaphysical decay begins to expose those two fragile elements to householders and visitors alike. These two sides of the same coin seep and bleed through the novel and their exposure is being hurried by the likes of Ms Eunice Gallagher, Cathy and Rob’s former tutor and governess. This winner of The Orange Prize for Fiction is like the curate’s egg, excellent in parts.

Helen Dunmore’s characters are wonderfully written. As you read through the novel it feels like each line is creating the skin and bone and organs of each character while each chapter is pumping blood through their perfectly, forming bodies.

By the end of A Spell of Winter, one feels that one has not only read about the characters but has actually met them. At times the novel does read like it is part of the Austen oeuvre. Being a lover of all things Austen, this is not a bad thing and may have been the author’s intention. Mr Bullivant reminded me Mr Charles Bingley from the same novel, good natured, well mannered, kind and wealthy.

His name is well chosen as it means, the good, faithful man. Decay of not only the grandfather’s house but of his mind and that of his sons. Decay in inhibitions and ultimately the morals of the two main characters, Cathy and her brother Rob.

The book’s title, A Spell of Winter, Cathy’s favourite time of the year, implies decay. And it is in that winter that Cathy can hide, physically and mentally, within its long hours of darkness. There are times when the dialogue does not do justice to the rest of the novel.

I like it here. It suits you. Personally, I believe the former reason. Rightly or wrongly I wondered if this was the kind of book I should be reading and enjoying but I also had the same thoughts when reading Nabakov’s Lolita.

Do I recommend this book? Yes I do. Did it deserve to win to win the Orange Prize for Fiction?

Helen dunmore a spell of winter download.A Spell of Winter

 
One person found this helpful. This was the first book on the list and I actually groaned out loud. I found it dark and unsavoury in parts, but it was a story I needed to get to the end of.

Helen dunmore a spell of winter download.A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore – FB2 download

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