I have, if you will forgive me, kept names to a minimum here, for reasons that will become understandable . After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, her first novel, Out of a Clear Sky , was published by Macmillan in 2008.

the slow unfolding, the macabre details, the setting, the beautiful writing about landscape, the expression of both freedom and isolation, the ways in which the ending is delicious and unsettling at once. I didn’t find the story as tense or as thrilling or as spooky as I thought it would be, and I felt it was almost a bit too timid and conservative for me. True, it contains some of the same beautiful evocations of landscape and wildlife that made her debut so memorable.I do think there are a number of unanswered questions that we're left with and it makes me question whether those plot points were really necessary to the story. In terms of the characters, I found the main character very hard to like and she thoroughly annoyed me. Everything about the story, how it’s told, how it’s written, the strength of the voice, the momentum of the plot.

I don’t like what the reveal suggested because it invalidates a lot of what the reader suspected was happening.My difficulties with this were partly linked to the fact that the tension between the psychological and the supernatural wasn’t resolved in a way I found particularly convincing, and partly to the representation of older and/or single women which seemed quite stereotypical. I did listen to this as an audiobook and I think the narrator did a great job which helped to make this more engaging than it might have been otherwise.