Why a Booktrail?
1980s: One rural farm house holds a wealth of buried secrets
All Things Cease to Appear
What you need to know before your trail
You are now passing through Chosen Upstate New York. There is a farm house over there, in the field on its own. It’s winter, so the ground is barren and cold and there’s no one about. George Clare returns home from work to find his wife murdered and their three-year-old daughter crying and afraid.
Of course he is the first suspect but he explains that he has been at work all day. Sadly the only witness is the poor little girl who is too young to talk.
Who could have ordered this family women and what secrets do the walls of the house contain? We then flash back to the early days when the couple met and trace the path to the final pages to see if justice is done and the real killer is found.
Locations
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Chosen
Chosen is a fictional setting in upstate New York but is a very descriptive and evocative place. The house where the Hale family have moved into is a chilling and eerie place with many secrets going back decades:
“The farm stood at the foot of the hill. Around it an aching emptiness of fields and wind. Within, a weight, a sense of being occupied, with more than its inhabitants.”
The landscape and the house in particular are main characters in the novel. The house sees the secrets and keeps them between its walls – the facade is clean and innocent, the inside quite different. George’s job brought them here and death seems to have inhabited the house before. Local boys who were here long before the Hales, now babysit and work for these newcomers.
Like the house itself, the marriage inside is not what you first think. The story of the marriage is a story in flux, the journey that will see the couple here in this house, this house with so much hidden inside its walls.
George Innes and landscapes
The author mentions the help and inspiration for the novel’s landscape came from the painter George Innes and so the booktrail reflects this. He was one of the so called Hudson River School movement who were landscape painters and who painted the areas in and around the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains amongst others.
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: All Things Cease to Appear
Authr/Guide: Eleizabeth Brundage Destination: Upstate New York Departure time: 1970s
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