Midwinterblood

Description

Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar even when you've never been there before, or felt that you've known someone even though you are meeting them for the first time? In a novel comprising seven short stories each of them influenced by a moon - flower moon, harvest moon, hunter's moon, blood moon - and travelling from 2073 back in time to the dark of the moon and the days of Viking saga, this is the story of Eric and Merle who have loved and lost one another and who have been searching for each other ever since. In the different stories the two appear as lovers, mother and son, brother and sister, artist and child as they come close to finding each other before facing the ultimate sacrifice. Beautifully imagined, intricately and cleverly structured this is a heart-wrenching and breathtaking love story, but it also has the hallmark Sedgwick gothic touch with plenty of blood-spilling, a vampire and sacrifice.

Marcus Sedgwick is a full-time author and the Writer in Residence at Bath University.

Midwinterblood contains much that is riveting, strange and darkly enchanting. I read it in a single feverish sitting, late one evening, and drifted to sleep haunted by its vision of love and fate and history. * THE GUARDIAN * It is something of a cliche for a reviewer to claim he devoured a book in a single sitting, and I have to admit that is not the case here. I began "Midwinterblood" late one evening in bed, dreamed about it through the night and finished it early the next morning. * THE NEW YORK TIMES * The Time Traveler's Wife meets Lost in this chilling exploration of love and memory. * KIRKUS REVIEWS * This is a novel that demands to be read more than once because it is only at the conclusion of the seven interlinked episodic stories that the complexity of the novel's extraordinary story of doomed love becomes clear... Sedgwick is a fine writer and this hugely atmospheric and demanding book will satisfy adults too. * Sally Morris, THE DAILY MAIL *