This is a story where the main character was born in the wrong era. She is bright, intelligent and very capable but is living in Edwardian England where a woman is counted as being worth very little compared to men. Unfortunately it is a battle that women very rarely managed to win.

I enjoyed Wakenhyrst so much that I went to see the author at a Blackwell's event and treated myself to the hardback - nothing beats owning a physical book, especially one with ivy covered end papers, a scarlet cover with magpie embellishment, and a striking dust jacket. Gorgeous!

Wakenhyrst is an historic novel firmly rooted in the Gothic tradition. The action takes place in Wake's End, an isolated manor house situated on the edge of the Suffolk Fens, where Maud is growing up under the strict control of her father, Edmund Stearn, who has become unsettled by the discovery of an old Doom painting in the local church of St Gustlaf.

Paver splits the narrative between Maud's inner voice and excerpts from her father's  journal, which Maud secretly reads. This device allows us to witness Maud encountering duplicity and hypocrisy. She learns that the 'truth' espoused by authority figures is a construct, a means of controlling others - the patriarchal view her father imposes and the moral codes advocated in church - while the superstitions the villagers and servants cling to are an attempt to make sense of their world. Maud grows to learn that she has the autonomy to embrace or reject these notions.

These themes of deception and self discovery, and Paver's vivid setting are ripe for exploring contradictions and inducing an atmosphere of unease. Paver is masterful at invoking all of the senses: the rustling reeds and a splash of water, the glimpse of a shadowy shape in the moonlight, the dank smell....you feel you are right there experiencing the doubt, the rising panic, the fear.

The Fens are shown in all their moods from the beauty of starling murmurations and moonlit nights to the menace of creeping mist. Maud embraces The Fens, accepting nature's indifference and finding solace outside. Her father, on the other hand, fears the landscape, associating it with a terrible secret, trying to deny its existence by insisting that windows and doors are shut and drawing up plans to drain the area.

Paver has crafted believably flawed characters, a darkly compelling plot, and a setting which is both beautiful and threatening. I loved it!

I loved this book. Dark, Gothic fiction with heavy religious and mythological overtones are very much in my wheelhouse and this ticked all those boxes. I loved Maud as a character and how much the environment and nature of the area played a part in the story. I would really recommend this title to others who enjoy slow burn page turners.

Medieval demons and Edwardian doom...					4 stars

Young Maud Stearne is a lonely child, growing up in an old house in the midst of the Suffolk fens in the early 20th century. Her strict and domineering father doesn’t have much love or time for any of his children, especially his daughter, and her mother is almost permanently pregnant, though most of those pregnancies don’t come to term. Edmund Stearne, her father, is searching for a book rumoured to have been written by a medieval mystic, the Book of Alice Pyett. But during the renovation of the local church, Edmund finds a medieval painting of the Last Judgement – the Wenhaston Doom – whitewashed over during the Reformation; and he becomes obsessed with the demons portrayed on it.

The book starts in the ‘60s, when an elderly Maud is being pestered by a journalist to tell the story of the murder her father committed when she was young. One day he ran out of the house carrying a sharpened ice-pick and killed the first person he saw, and then went mad. No-one except Maud has ever known why he did it, and she has never spoken about it. Edmund spent many years in an asylum, painting demons, and has now died. Maud has lived an isolated existence in her childhood home since the tragedy and still doesn’t want to talk about it. But when for financial reasons she finally decides to open up, she chooses another recipient for the story – a young academic called Robin Hunter who has been researching Edmund’s paintings. The story Maud tells is one of Gothic horror, with at its heart the question – was Edmund driven mad by supernatural evil or are the evil things that happened a result of his existing madness?

I didn’t find this book nearly as scary as Paver’s earlier ventures into the supernatural – Dark Matter, the best modern horror story I’ve read, and Thin Air. However, it still has plenty to recommend it. It’s a slow burn in the beginning as we learn about Maud’s restricted life and her vague misunderstandings about what she calls her mother’s “groanings” - the miscarriages and stillbirths that happen all too often. But once Maud becomes a little older – her midteens – her father begins to involve her in his work, not out of affection but to save himself the annoyance of having a secretary in the house. As she types up his research notes, she also begins to understand what kind of man he is – cold, bullying, selfish, misogynistic. And increasingly obsessed by the feeling that he is in danger from the forces of evil. 

The story is told as a third person narrative for the most part, but includes many extracts from Edmund’s journal and some from the Book of Alice Pyett. Gradually we learn how his researches are feeding Edmund’s obsession and, along with Maud, we become aware that there is a mystery in Edmund’s past.

The characterisation of both Maud and her father is excellent. Neither is likeable, though one’s sympathies are all for Maud. As she becomes aware that her mother’s frequent pregnancies are a result of her father’s refusal to practice any form of self-restraint, her desire to win his affection changes into a form of hatred. Isolated and unloved, she must work her own way through the difficult years of adolescence, and the position of women is such that she has no hope of escaping her father’s control. She is strong, but is she strong enough to face the atmosphere of dread that is slowly descending over the household?

Strip the horror element out completely, and it’s still a deeply disturbing picture of life under a tyrannical father at a time when children had no independent rights, and even adult women were entirely under the control of their husbands. Alice Pyett’s story is based on the famous medieval Book of Margery Kempe (which I haven’t read) and is of another woman whose life was blighted by excessive childbirth. Whatever demons are after Edmund – supernatural or self-inflicted – I felt he deserved all he got. But like most tyrants, even as he suffered, he made sure those around him suffered too.

After the relatively slow start, I found myself totally absorbed in the second half. It’s very well written and full of interesting stuff about medieval beliefs and superstitions along with lots of Suffolk folklore. I didn’t buy into the supernatural aspect, but it didn’t matter – the ambiguity means that it works just as well, perhaps even better, as a fully human story of madness and cruelty. People can be far more frightening than demons...

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Head of Zeus.

Reading this reminds me why I am a fan of Michelle Pavers writing. It is not immediately clear that you are about to learn of a persons descent into madness fuelled by a denial of any wrong doing on their part. That person being the eminent scholar and historian Edmund Stearn, also Mauds father. 
 A subtle and excellent gothic horror set in in a creepy house on the fens.Anyone who has visited a medieval church and seen the graphic pictorial depictions of the devil and what awaits sinners could understand how an unbalanced mind could descend into madness. Add into the mix the fens, superstitions, and awful secrets hidden in the past and there you have it.
Where this narrative differs is the writing which is descriptive and realistic. It draws the reader in by allowing glimpses of the past. 
The story unfolds as more details are revealed and the line between what really happened and what is possibly supernatural in nature becomes blurred. How much is simply superstition? The period in which it is set is at a time when the freedom of women still largely depended on the whim of male members of the family and thought not to have any need of an education. Maud gradually finds out her beloved fathers true nature on finding her fathers diaries and is horrified by its revelations.
The characters are well defined and believable. Mauds love of the fens and her love of birds, the magpie Chatterpie,Clem and also the shameless Ivy all have a part to play in the downfall of the Edmund Stearn. The fens become a character in itself taking on a life of its own. Excellent writing I am looking forward to more from this author.

Michelle Paver's new novel is a cyclical narrative set in the Suffolk Fens. Not only does it capture the Edwardian period beautifully but it is a haunting, evocative tale firmly rooted in the Gothic genre.

Maud lives in a relic of a house with her mysterious father and beloved maman - but the latter tragically dies in Maud's childhood, leaving her under the care of various housekeepers and putting up with the strange relationship her father has with Ivy, an employee who's of a similar age. As time goes on, Maud begins to suspect her father's odd behaviour; she reads his journals and ledgers; she is curious as to what is going on inside his corrupt mind.

The narrative is strongest when it focuses on Maud - but less so from her father, Edward Stearne, whose private diaries, told in the first-person, explore his investigations into the supernatural and the outcomes of research which gets somewhat out of hand.

'Wakenhyrst' covers a number of decades in the characters' lives. Even though it is a convincing and compelling read, showing how much Paver has researched so many elements, parts of it jar - particularly the Edward Stearne sections with seem quite contrived and somewhat implausible. I found myself wanting more of the Maud narrative overall. Having said this, like some of the author's other novels, the time period is portrayed in a very effective, imaginative way and this makes it a really good read.

The journals of painter and historian Edmund Stearne have been kept safely in Wake's End since his admittance to an asylum for the criminally insane. He admitted he did it but that he never did anything wrong. 60 years later, his daughter releases his, and her, story to the world.

Wakenhyrst is a gothic style horror set in the fens of East Anglia. While the characters are fictional, much of the story is based on real historical accounts; the delirious writings of a spiritualist, the disturbing paintings of asylum inmates, and the doom, a religious mural depicting the Day of Judgement.

Through Edmund's journal, his entitlement of his position in the world is clear. He can treat those in his household how he pleases, as long as he keeps up appearances to society. As Maud's account starts, she knows her mother is constantly ill, resulting in "the groaning". Edmund's sexual desires take precedence over his wife's health, who repeatedly suffers miscarriages. Young Maud makes up her own version of events until she starts to read her father's journals.

I loved the decision to switch between the despicable man of the times and the girl's perspective. In Thin Air, the main character was racist and arrogant, and despite it fitting for the time, it was a little off-putting. In Wakenhyrst, Edmund can have horrible attitudes towards women but it's tempered by Maud's perspective. He might think her weak minded but she's quite the opposite. It also means you're looking forward to something bad happening to him!

Maud's a fantastic character. As she reads her father's journal, her opinion of him changes rapidly and she starts to subtly annoy him on purpose. She saves and befriends a magpie, hence the cover, and she strikes up a friendship with the handsome gardener, someone below her station as far as her father is concerned. Through this it highlights the power imbalance caused by poverty.

Maud loves the fen and feels at home wandering its watery wilderness. However her father is scared of it, his guilt manifesting in his paranoia. The pervasive marsh smell starts to haunt him as he becomes more and more obsessed with the rantings of Alice Pyett, ironically a female spiritualist. It's gripping and tense, and my favourite Michelle Paver book by far.

Paver's slice of Gothic horror manages to be both true to and critical of its often anti-female roots, joining the likes of Laura Purcell's The Silent Companions and the work of Sarah Perry as exciting new twists on an already rich and compulsively readable genre. Balancing the psychological with the supernatural is no mean feat, but Wakenhyrst seems to manage it with ease, resulting in a story that will linger (like so many spooky medieval demons) long after the final page.

At just nine years old, Maud Sterne begins to realise how unfair and unforgiving the world can be. At ten she glimpses the true brutality of her father and the desperation that rattles away inside her poor mother. At eleven, she begins to question everything around her. The way her father and brother disregard and crush any hopes, aspirations and desires she has because she is a girl. The way simple pleasures such as reading are banned and injustices are allowed, the way her freedom is kept so far from her own hands. Her single consolation is the natural world. The birds and the eels and the wildlife all around her in the fen and the hope of one day sharing their freedom.

For such a long time, she has struggled to unravel the subtext to words whispered around her but now she is starting to glimpse the truth, so frightening and brutal in so many ways. The truth about her father. Her mother and the world around her.

Maud lives a somewhat isolated life with her family at Wake’s End, an old Manor House in Wakenhyrst. Edward Sterne, her father, is a historian and scholar, deeply religious and devoted to his beliefs. He is also a tyrant. Cruel, malicious and wicked. He is fuelled by his own wants and needs, regardless of how they hurt those around him. When he finds a centuries old painting in the undergrowth near Wake’s End, his grasp on reality falters. Secretly reading his journal, Maud is an unknown audience to her father’s sprawl into madness. But neither of them will ever predict what is about to happen and how it will alter their future. 

Wakenhyrst buzzes with tension and atmosphere. Maud is a character you can’t help but admire and applaud, her strength, determination and resilience is apparent in every page. I hated Edward for his cruelty and arrogance. The author has crafted such a vivid portrait of these characters. They draw you into a seamless story of strength and weakness, hope and fear, reality and insanity.

Vivid. Shocking. Atmospheric.

Paver is amazing at creating worlds that fully immerse the reader and Wakenhyrst was no different. The claustrophobia of it being set mainly in one setting added to the intrigue and mystery of the story and it gave it an almost fantasy feel.. Would 100% recommend.

Enjoyed this slightly different story from Michelle Paver. Really gripping through to the end and suitably spooky too.

Michelle Paver's Dark Matter and Thin Air are two of my favourite ghost stories, so I was particularly excited to read Wakenhyrst, a claustrophobic piece of rural gothic set in the flat, damp murk of the Suffolk Fens. At the start of the book, it's the 1960s and an elderly woman, Maud Stearne, is living alone at Wake's End, a fenland manor house near the isolated village of Wakenhyrst. Maud is the daughter of Edmund Stearne, who, back in the Edwardian era when Maud was still a girl, was sent to Broadmoor after murdering a young man in a horrific, entirely unprovoked frenzy and subsequently became known for the apocalyptic paintings he produced while locked up there. Keen to write a book about what happened at Wake's End, an academic visits the mysterious Maud in the hope of persuading her to tell her story.

That story, which forms the rest of the book, is a strange and absorbing one. The landscape and wildlife of the fens - sometimes beautiful, sometimes sinister - are richly described in every detail. Maud adores the fen on the family's land, fascinated by its birds, animals and insects and befriending the mysterious Jubal Rede, a hermit-like outcast who survives there. Father, meanwhile, detests it. Surely a man like Father - an almost puritanical Protestant and a classical scholar - can't believe the locals' tales of the imp-like demons and spirits that live there. Does he simply abhor anything that's wild and untamed? Or does the fen have other, darker associations for him? And how might it be connected with the Wakenhyrst Doom, the mediaeval painting of the Last Judgement which has just been accidentally uncovered at the local church?

At the heart of the story throughout, Maud is a pleasingly complex character and it's fascinating to watch her naivety fall away and her heart harden as she comes to realise the truth about her father and to understand more fully the misogyny at the root of women's place in Edwardian society. As for the other characters, we see them only through eyes of Maud and in the pages of Father's diary, so it's left to us to try and imagine them without those filters. Is Ivy the maid really as mercenary as Maud believes her to be and as lascivious as Father's depiction of her? Or is she simply seeking a route out of her desperate poverty in the only way, after a life of abuse, she knows how?

You can feel the tensions and frustrations of the stifling rigidity of the Stearnes' family life that imposed by Father throughout this book. Father's control over his Belgian wife, Maud's adored Maman, is particularly chilling and there's a horrible inevitability to her fate. Maman is almost permanently pregnant, suffering miscarriages and stillbirths at least once a year which sap her mental and physical strength, but any suggestion by the doctor to Father that contraceptive methods or even just self-control ('Perhaps not every night, eh?') might save her is met with a dismissive disdain that tells us, and Maud, everything we need to know about Father's attitude to women, and the underlying hypocrisy of his religious views, which can apparently be readily bent to allow him his own pleasures, but not to allow Maman to keep mementos of her own dead children, a practice Father deems too much like Catholic idolatry.

Folklore and superstitions run through this book, with the village people, including the Wake's End servants, imbuing almost every act and object with significance and ritual. Magpies are bad omens because their pied feathers suggest they didn't wear mourning for Christ. Women mustn't wash while menstruating. Toads are devils in disguise. Superstition is just as oppressive as organised religion seems to be here, a source of constant fear and anxiety that drives people to pointless cruelty. There's also just enough ambiguity about Father's madness for even Maud, and us as readers, not to be immune to the suggestion that there's something of the supernatural about Wake's End.

While I didn't find this book frightening, exactly, it's extremely atmospheric and has a strong sense of the past not just haunting but defining the present. It's not a fast-paced story, but it shouldn't be - if it were, it would jar with the notion of time passing slowly with the seasons, and with the boredom and loneliness which shape Maud's character and interests. While this isn't a terrifying chiller like Paver's ghost stories, this beautifully written Edwardian folk horror tale gripped me from the very start.

This is the first one I've read from Paver but I get the hype! The truly gothic atmosphere in this book is spine chilling, Fens is the perfect setting for the story. Maud's story was definitely a page-turner one and I loved the psychological horror side of this book- it wouldn't be as good if it was a plain paranormal story. Very elegantly done. 4 stars

A great gothic tale that is really dark in its content.
The story surrounds a young girl Maud who has to deal with her historian father who is researching and obsessed with the medieval take on heaven and hell . 
Her fathers action during the course of the book verge on the boarders of madness, but as he is a respected person in his field nobody will listen to Mauds concerns with devastating consequences.
Although I enjoyed the book at times I found it difficult to read.

This Gothic tale of dark-doings in the Fens is something of a departure for Michelle Paver, being more psychological horror rather than a truly paranormal tale. There are ghostly goings-on for sure, but are supernatural forces at work, or is it all the delusion of an obsessed, deranged mind? With it’s sinister overtones of madness and a dark past washing over the present, Wakenhyrst reminded me more of Rebecca than the author’s previous work. 
In so many ways, the truest horror to be found at Wakenhyrst is the misfortune of being born female at a time when women were disregarded and of little value to most men - other than as brood mares for sons. This mundane aspect of the tale was the most vicious of all, far more sinister than the dark aspect of purportedly cursed Mediaeval paintings and the supposed horrors of the surrounding fen.
The story is peopled by memorable Fenland characters whose old ways and superstitions make for sharp contrast against the supposed modernity of encroaching science - and which are most deluded? The religious villagers, who still secretly fear witchcraft and leave a bowl of bread and milk at the door every night, or the smug, complacent certainty of Edwardian males who cannot contemplate that notion a solid, decent, public-school chap might conceivably go mad? 
The tale is a compelling one. The mysteries at Wakenhyrst’s heart make for a deeply-engaging, page-turning read, laced with a darkly, claustrophobic sense of threat and impending disaster that builds to a truly catastrophic end.

A gripping gothic thriller, full of medieval folk lore and mystery set in the Fens. The story revolves round Maud an only child whose mother died giving birth to her 8th child.  Maud, an intelligent, free spirit, who  is ruled by her repressive father and her world is haunted by witchcraft, age old legends and the nightmarish demons of her father's past.  The story which spans several centuries, is spine-chilling with a real sense of menace,  A beautifully written atmospheric page turner.

Wakenhyrst is the first book I have read by Michelle Paver but from the outset I had an inkling that I would enjoy her style of writing.

Wakenhyrst begins with an article in a magazine which begins as follows:

“Like a witch’s lair in a fairytale the ancient manor house crouches in its tangled garden. I can’t take my eyes off the ivy choked window above the front door. It was from that window in 1913 that 16-year old Maud Sterne watched her father set off down the steps with an ice-pick, a geological hammer – and murder in his heart.”

The article then goes on to suggest that there may have been more than meets the eye to this crime and implies that Maud was involved in witchcraft and that she was the one who committed the murders.

This introduction to our protagonist immediately sows the seeds of doubt surrounding the trustworthiness of our narrator.

Maud grew up in a manor house called Wakes End in a little hamlet called Wakenhyrst. The house is surrounded by the gloomy Guthlaf’s Fen. Her father’s crimes were largely forgotten until some paintings he made in an asylum surfaced and became popular.

The description of the fen adds to the atmosphere of the book and makes the potential for something supernatural to be going on seem much more likely and the belief in its possibility much more understandable.

“The watery wilderness that guards Wakes End is the last real fen: the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia. It’s said to be the oldest rottenest fen ever. Here lived the dreaded ‘fen tigers’: savage folks who doctored their ‘ague’ with home-brewed opium and feared nothing but the spirits that haven’t the means.”

At the time the article was published Maud was 69 and looking back on the events of her childhood because Wakes End is in bad need of repairs and she needs the money.

Was a demon lurking in the fen or was her father mad?

Wakenhyrst was a fast read and I throughly enjoyed it, I am definitely looking forward to reading more from this author.

This was in no way as scary as the advance publication had led me to expect, but that wasn't a worry and luckily, it meant that I could read this in bed before going to sleep!

The novel concerns Maud and her relationship with her eccentric, widower Edwardian father who we learn about mainly through his journals. The characters are well-drawn, including the third main character (with Maud and her father) which is the mysterious Fen area where they live in an isolated house with a few local Fenland servants.

The author's note at the end of the novel is not to be missed. It tells how the plot evolved, describes the provenance of some vital incidents and indicates how much detailed research goes into writing fiction.

Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for giving me a copy of "Wakenhyrst" in exchange for this honest review. 4.5 stars!

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver is a real blockbuster of a Gothic novel. I was engrossed while following the life of Maud, the plain daughter of the household, who faced and dealt with her ever increasingly disturbed father's actions. The characters were strong and well drawn and the landscape was so graphically and atmospherically described, I felt I was there in the fens alongside Maud.

The author has obviously painstakingly researched both the geography and the landscape of the area. I recommend reading the author's note at the end of the book which illustrates her sources and inspiration.

DNF!

I loved the intro of the book, it was so interesting with the article about Maud's father. Then, the story went back in time to when Maud was growing up and I just felt that the story turned more and more boring to listen to (I picked the audiobook version). It came to a point when I just felt that enough is enough. I'm not that interesting in Maud's childhood and youth and her feelings for the young gardener. Her father's diary notes are not rocking my boat. I'm just not the right reader so I decided to quit around 60%...