When Anna and David receive a phone call late one evening, their lives are upturned. Within minutes, they are travelling to the west coast of Scotland, preparing to care for two young sisters, tragically and suddenly orphaned.
It's a beautiful place, the heather is in bloom, the birds wheel above the waves, the deer graze peacefully in the distance. But the large granite house is no longer a home for the girls, and Anna knows she can never take the place of their mother. Then David invites his friend to stay, to 'ease them through' and Anna finds herself increasingly isolated, with everything she - and the girls - once knew of life discarded and overruled by a man of whom she is deeply suspicious.
The Wilderness by Sarah Duguid is a relatively short quick
read but that contains a somewhat dark sinister storyline. Following a family
tragedy Anna and David travel to the wild and isolated home in Scotland of
their nieces after their parents die, but the girls have led a very sheltered
life and are going to take some nurturing to help them through their grief before
there is any chance of them moving home but when their friend Brendan arrives to
help his ways are not what Anna feels the girls need and increasingly Anna
finds herself not being listened too and she yearns for her old life back.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this book but I sure
got a creepy haunting surprise! The whole tone of the novel had me on alert and
felt eerie and sinister which is probably helped ny the secluded location and
enhanced by the nature of Brendan who had alarm bells ringing from very early
on in the book.
I appreciated Anna’s raw honesty in wanting to have her life
return to normal even though it was her expected duty to be there for the girls.
There was no strong connections between any of the characters which I think
made making connections with the characters hard but that just gave an added
isolated feel.
This was a well written atmospheric novel that gave me the
creeps!
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